Uncovering the language of wine experts

Abstract

Talking about odors and flavors is difficult for most people, yet experts appear to be able to convey critical information about wines in their reviews. This seems to be a contradiction, and wine expert descriptions are frequently received with criticism. Here, we propose a method for probing the language of wine reviews, and thus offer a means to enhance current vocabularies, and as a by-product question the general assumption that wine reviews are gibberish. By means of two different quantitative analyses—support vector machines for classification and Termhood analysis—on a corpus of online wine reviews, we tested whether wine reviews are written in a consistent manner, and thus may be considered informative; and whether reviews feature domain-specific language. First, a classification paradigm was trained on wine reviews from one set of authors for which the color, grape variety, and origin of a wine were known, and subsequently tested on data from a new author. This analysis revealed that, regardless of individual differences in vocabulary preferences, color and grape variety were predicted with high accuracy. Second, using Termhood as a measure of how words are used in wine reviews in a domain-specific manner compared to other genres in English, a list of 146 wine-specific terms was uncovered. These words were compared to existing lists of wine vocabulary that are currently used to train experts. Some overlap was observed, but there were also gaps revealed in the extant lists, suggesting these lists could be improved by our automatic analysis.

Do you want a description with that wine? The role of wine mental imagery in consumer's desire to drink using the revised Vividness of Wine Imagery Questionnaire (VWIQ‐II)

“…Since the descriptors in the current study were written following guidelines of standardized wine education (i.e., WSET), we primarily employed metonymies in the descriptors used (i.e., the first category), from diverse source domains (e.g., fruits, spices, flowers) that may be found regularly in wine vocabulary (cf. Croijmans, Hendrickx, et al, 2020).…”

Mapping the semantic organization of the English odor vocabulary using natural language data

“…Some studies have used language data to quantify descriptors with respect to how strongly they are associated with olfaction and gustation. Croijmans et al (2019) used a textbased, computational approach on a collection of wine reviews in order to identify the vocabulary used to describe wine qualities. Iatropoulos et al (2018) developed the method employed in the present study, the Olfactory Association Index (OAI), which quantifies words with respect to how strongly associated they are with olfactory and gustatory contexts.…”

Human Olfaction at the Intersection of Language, Culture, and Biology

“…The hunter-gatherer Jahai name odors with higher consensus than their Western counterparts and apply their basic smell terms to novel odors they have never previously encountered [39]. Wine experts, too, show high consensus when describing the smell of wine [123][124][125][126], but this ability does not generalize beyond their domain of expertise: they are no better than laypeople at describing the smell of coffee or naming other everyday odors [123,125]. Similarly, wine experts have better memory [123] and imagery [127] only for odors in their domain of expertise (see also [122]).…”