What We Talk About When We Talk About Pinot Noir
Meg Maker
This reflective paper examines the evolving languages, lexicons, and motifs used to describe Pinot Noir, exploring the implications for this wine’s cultural identity. All language evolves, its vocabularies and vernaculars enjoying cycles of emergence, expansion, standardization, modernization, and reinvention. Such a cycle has radically transformed wine discourse over the last half-century. During the 1960s and 70s, English-language wine writing principally attended to wine’s provenance and typicity. Writers like Frank Schoonmaker and Frank Prial trained their lens on wine’s cultural and geographical origins, its social versus hedonic signature, and its character versus its flavor. But as the century progressed, and as globalization expanded access to the world’s wines, demand rose for detailed insights to support connoisseurship. Wine commentary began to emphasize wine’s flavor and olfactory impressions, and the writing suddenly bloomed with metaphors. Two approaches emerged. One was structural and scientific, urged by formalists like Émile Peynaud, Maynard Amerine, and Ann Noble, and embraced by wine credentialing organizations. It aimed to create a system to describe wines’ sensory impact that was free of subjective connotations, and to arm industry professionals with tools to ensure consistent and objective commentary. The other was affective and poetic, popularized by critics like Robert M. Parker Jr. It was engaging, flowery, and populist, and drove demand (and marketing materials) for highly rated wines. Both approaches reflected a shift away from wine’s broad cultural significance toward its impact on the individual taster, from origin to experience, from “what is this wine about” to “what is this wine about to me?” This paper uses Pinot Noir as a case study to examine the shift in descriptive motifs used to make sense of this wine. It evaluates how the lexical and linguistic choices have evolved to keep up with Pinot Noir’s evolving significance. Finally, it considers how insights from these explorations extend to other wines to offer broader implications for wine’s role in shaping cultural identity.
Meg Maker is an American writer, artist, and educator curious about nature, culture, food, and place. Her work explores wine and food as expressions of social and cultural identity, and how these manifest history, tradition, and fashion. She’s particularly interested in how wine became modern, how it’s becoming post-modern, and how makers have continually reinvented it to fit evolving tastes and technologies. Her active research focuses on wine language and lexicons and how our linguistic choices reinforce or explode notions of wine in material culture. Meg has academic training in fine art, creative writing, cultural history, and life sciences. She earned a BA in Visual Studies summa cum laude and an MA in Creative Writing, both from Dartmouth. Her writing and illustrations have appeared in trade and lifestyle media and her own publication, Maker’s Table, and she is a frequent lecturer and educator about wine and wine discourse. Her work has earned mention in the New York Times, Washington Post, Jancisrobinson.com, and elsewhere, and won Born Digital Awards, Wine Blog Awards, was twice shortlisted for IACP Food Writing Awards, and was Notable in Best American Travel Writing. She is the chair of the Circle of Wine Writers, a member of Wine Scholar Guild, and a Certified Specialist of Wine. She lives in New Hampshire.