Later I learned that the term has almost nothing to do with anatomy, but rather with a poor and lazy translation of English wine jargon. Midpalate does not mean middle palate. It refers to the stage of impression while the wine passes through the middle of the oral cavity. But once the term entered wine parlance, no one questioned it anymore. On the contrary, the more vague it sounded, the more expert it seemed.
And that's where my problem with much of the wine language begins
Not with wine. I love wine. I love it seriously, curiously, and devotedly. I love the hours spent around the table, the discussions about vintages, the small differences between great locations, that miraculous ability of wine to smell like the landscape it comes from. But the more I love wine, the less I can stand the way it is often talked about. Because a huge part of wine discourse today serves not to explain something but to impress someone. Open any serious wine portal and you will very quickly come across sentences like the following:
The wine opens with tertiary notes of humus, wet stone and restrained animality
And now one doesn't know whether one is reading a drink description or a police report after an incident at the zoo on a rainy evening. But the problem is not with metaphors. Without them, wine would be as boring as a technical data sheet for a washing machine. The problem is in dead metaphors. In a language that no one really feels anymore, but uses because it sounds professional enough. Much of the language of wine is actually written for other wine writers, not for real people.
Candied lime, honeycomb, kirsch, wet dog, old cellar...
The vast majority of people have never consciously smelled half of these things. That's why such descriptions often sound elitist or contrived. The American wine critic Dan Berger once very accurately observed that a wine description should help one imagine the wine, not admire the author. And therein lies the problem with much of contemporary wine criticism: it often says more about the critic than the wine itself.
The best wine writers don't write in the most professional way, but in the most human way
That's why Oz Clarke, a man whose wine books sell all over the world, once explained to me how he approaches describing wine: I've never seen a sumo wrestler and I can't even imagine what the inside of his suit looks like, but that didn't stop me from describing a wine as the smell of a sumo wrestler's scratch under his underwear. The wine was later sold out. People bought it just to see if such a description was even possible. And that's the point.
A wine description doesn't have to be sterilely professional to be serious
It has to be personal. It has to evoke an image, an emotion or a memory. Clarke understood this perfectly. When he talks about wine, he's not just talking about chemistry, he's talking about memory. For example, he said of several Teran wines that they smell like the Poreč Cathedral. Someone else might simply say that there are notes of incense. But it's not the same. When you say that a wine smells like the Poreč Cathedral at the end of mass, while people are kneeling, the candles are burning even hotter and the priest is lighting incense, then you can almost physically smell that scent.
Suddenly wine is no longer an academic analysis but an experience
And that is a huge difference. A good wine description is not born out of a need to impress but rather to convey an experience. A bad description is born when one tries to sound more important than the wine actually is. Here we return to the famous mid palate, verticality of wine, nervous acidity and other expressions that often serve as a kind of password for entering the elite club of people who understand wine. The author thinks that he seems more expert the less understandable his sentence is.
The wine world adors that kind of authority
A person who thinks he doesn't understand wine will always need someone to interpret it for him. Thus, over the past decades, a whole system of professional interpreters has developed around wine: sommeliers, educators, certificates, schools, workshops, ratings and guides. Of course, there is a lot of knowledge and sincere passion among them. The problem arises when language stops serving communication and starts serving hierarchy. When an ordinary person no longer knows whether to say that a wine is really good.
That's the only sentence that really matters
Wine has been a popular drink for centuries. It was drunk by peasants, fishermen, laborers and families at lunch. No one in the old taverns spoke on the middle palate, you can feel a discreet reduction. They would say it's good or it's too sour, and everyone would understand perfectly what they were talking about. Perhaps that's why the greatest revolution in the wine world would be terribly simple: to learn to speak human language again. Not to make wine more banal, but to make it human again.