How many palates does a person actually have?

“On the middle palate, the wine reveals additional layers of complexity.”

When I first read that, I genuinely began to worry about my own anatomy. How many palates does a person actually have? One? Two? And where, exactly, is this famous middle palate?

Later, I learned that the expression had almost nothing to do with anatomy and everything to do with poor, lazy translation of English wine jargon into Croatian. “Midpalate” does not mean “middle palate”, as the Croatian rendering would suggest. It refers to a stage in the impression a wine makes as it passes through the middle of the mouth. But once the expression entered the language of wine, nobody questioned it again. Quite the opposite: the less clear it sounded, the more expert it seemed.

And that is where my problem with much of the language of wine begins.

Not with wine itself. I love wine. I love it seriously, curiously and wholeheartedly. I love the hours spent around a table, the arguments about vintages, the small differences between vineyard sites, that wonderful ability wine has to smell of the landscape it comes from. But the more I love wine, the less I can bear the way people so often talk about it.

Because a vast amount of wine discourse today is designed to impress someone rather than explain something.

Open almost any serious wine website, and you will soon encounter sentences such as:

“The wine unfolds tertiary notes of humus, wet stone and restrained animality.”

And now you cannot tell whether you are reading a description of a drink or a police report following an incident at the zoo on a rainy evening.

But metaphors are not the problem. Without them, wine would be as boring as the specifications for a washing machine. The problem is dead metaphors. Language that nobody really feels any more, but uses because it sounds sufficiently expert.

Much of the language of wine is actually written for other wine writers, rather than real people. “Candied lime”, “honeycomb”, “kirsch”, “wet slate”, “wet dog”, “old cellar”: the vast majority of people have never consciously smelled half these things. That is why such descriptions often sound elitist or made up.

The American wine critic Dan Berger once observed very precisely that a wine description should help a person imagine the wine, rather than admire the writer. And that is exactly the problem with much of contemporary wine criticism: it often says more about the critic than about the wine itself.

The best wine writers almost never write in the most technical language. They write in the most human language.

That is why Oz Clarke, a man whose wine books sell tens of thousands of copies around the world, once explained to me how he approaches describing wine.

He told me:

“I have never seen a sumo wrestler, and I cannot even imagine what the inside of his outfit looks like, but that did not stop me from describing one wine as smelling like a graze on a sumo wrestler beneath his underpants.”

The wine later sold out. People bought it simply to find out whether such a description was even possible.

And that is the whole point.

A wine description does not have to be sterile and technical to be serious. It has to be personal. It has to awaken an image, an emotion or a memory. Clarke understood that perfectly. When he talks about wine, he is talking about memory as well as chemistry.

He said, for instance, that several Teran wines smelled like the cathedral in Poreč.

Someone else would simply have written:

“There are notes of incense.”

But that is not the same thing.

Because when you say that a wine smells like the cathedral in Poreč at the end of Mass, with people kneeling, candles still burning and the priest just lighting the incense, you can almost physically sense that smell. Suddenly, the wine becomes an experience rather than an academic analysis.

And that is an enormous difference.

A good wine description comes from the desire to convey an experience rather than impress. A bad one emerges when someone tries to sound more important than the wine itself.

Which brings us back to the famous “middle palate”, the “verticality” of wine, “nervous acidity” and other expressions that often serve as a kind of password to an exclusive club of people who “understand wine”. The less comprehensible the sentence, the more knowledgeable its writer sometimes appears.

And the wine world is terribly fond of that kind of authority.

Because someone who believes they “don’t understand wine” will always need somebody to interpret it for them. Over recent decades, an entire system of professional interpreters has grown up around wine: sommeliers, educators, certificates, schools, workshops, scores and guides. Of course, there is a great deal of knowledge and sincere passion among them. The problem arises only when language stops serving communication and starts serving hierarchy.

When an ordinary person no longer knows whether they are allowed to say:

“That’s a really lovely wine.”

And perhaps that is the only sentence that truly matters.

Because for centuries, wine was an everyday drink. Farmers, fishermen, labourers and families at lunch drank it. Nobody in the old taverns said:

“There is a discreet hint of reduction on the middle palate.”

They would say:

“It’s good.”

Or:

“It’s too acidic.”

And everyone understood perfectly what they meant.

Perhaps the greatest revolution in the wine world would therefore be terribly simple: learning once again to speak in human language.

So that wine can become human again, rather than more banal.