Wine descriptors and BS and figuring out what I think

Should we really try to emulate the wine world in our descriptions of beer? It's an endless debate and I admit I go back and forth on this. The question was brought up for me again by an interesting article in Slate (here) which calls out the wine world for very clearly being influenced by price more than actual flavors in the descriptions.

I'm getting cassis and flint.

The sharpest critics call the high falutin wine descriptions out as bullshit and I can't say I completely disagree.* It's also elitist -- it's a pose as much as a position; it's meant to signal the author's own refinement and sensitivity as well as to demarcate those who "get" such descriptors from those clods who don't or can't or never had the chance to compare "truffle" and "graphite" or "black currant" and "fig". And it's also funny and slightly ridiculous and everyone knows it. (Soupçon of asparagus anyone?)

Still, I'm not quite so sure beer folks should throw out the idea of building better descriptors. I also prefer the more technical definitions of a beer, at least at first -- I want to know if it's dry or sweet, bitter or malty, thick or thin on the tongue. But "bitter" doesn't say much about the actual character of the flavoring hops -- are they like blackberry or pine tar, or are they like a squirt of grapefruit up your nose? And what about the character of the malt? Sometimes "fig" actually is what it tastes like!

I guess when it comes down to it, I think problem in the wine world is the pretension rather than the actual descriptors. Most beer descriptors are pretty direct and unpretentious -- even when we are talking about the non-mainstream beers.  Almost everyone know what grapefruit tastes and smells like, right?  And pine tar?  And more than once I've heard things at competitions along the lines of "this beer smells like apple Jolly Ranchers, doesn't it?"**

But sometimes the more exotic descriptions are actually apt and probably they are worth keeping.  There is a difference between black currant and fig, and beers can sometimes have either of those flavors. And if you've never had either -- well, maybe it's time to live a little.  Sometimes water character can lead a beer to taste "flinty" or even "gravelly". And no, I don't go around licking gravel, but your nose can and should pick up those "flavors" and sometimes you're sitting there trying to describe a beer and they seem right. And if someone describes an aroma in your beer as "sultana" instead of "raisin" or "white grape" or something, then maybe ridicule them for being obnoxious. But immediately after that, try your beer and see if just maybe they're on to something.

(I thought this was going to be a short post! By the way, Pete Brown has an interesting writeup of a wine/beer pairing comparison where he ends up favoring the wines, at least for some dishes. It's here if you haven't seen it.)

Notes:
* Personally, and this is just me, but I would prefer a different methodology for both of these. Instead of figuring by probability of a word for expensive or inexpensive, for example, why not use the data to build a vocabulary, and then cluster (or some similar relational method) by co-occurence?  Then test for differences across the price? That way, you can talk about types of descriptor. And you can test whether the differences actually compare with differences in the taste of the wines.

** I've also myself described some beers as smelling "like banana Now-And-Laters," especially the American beers that try for a Belgian thing without really handling the yeast well.  Actually the wikipedia list of Now-And-Later flavors is a good, non pretentious place to start with white wine descriptors too!