DefVINitions – Behind the winespeak

An intriguingly elegant young claret – possibly there’s some fruit here but I can’t detect it
 
A wine of infinite subtlety – I can’t understand why everyone thinks this wine is so wonderful
 
This wine would go well with…. – This is what I had to eat last night
 
Superb with new season’s milk-fed lamb – I have an organic butcher around the corner
 
Of course Australia is not a country, it’s a continent – despite attempts at regional differentiation it is still all bloody chardonnay, cabernet and shiraz.
 
Vin du patron – the patron who originally drank this is long dead but we’ve been using this as a substitute for embalming fluid.
 
This wine is an animal/a massive beast – This wine is so alcoholic you could cauterise open wounds with it
 
I do not work for a supermarket - I work for a supermarket
 
Viognier is the new Sauvignon - I meant to do this article last year and I missed the deadline
 
It's summer again - Time to rehash my "Rosés aren't absolutely disgusting" piece
 
Watch out France - Supermarkets are doing their year-round six for the price of two Vatted plonks from Chile, Bulgaria etc.
 
Jacob's Creek is actually not a bad drink - The date is April 1st
 
A fresh lively champagne at £8.50... - remarkable value even for battery acid

Cult wines – Should be known as Boutique and the Beastly Prices. Revered by wine collectors because of their alleged rarity. Rationing the wine creates a Pavlovian reaction amongst wealthy buyers whose willingness to be resoundingly ripped off drives the prices into the empyrean. Prime candidates for those with obese bank accounts include Chateau Le Pin Number, much-Mooted Grange, and that rarest of avises, the wine Tim Atkin felicitously calls Screaming Ego (nee Eagle).

Finesse – a term like breeding, elegance and femininity referring to a bygone age when wines belonged to gentlemen’s clubs and used to wear old school ties.

Fizzy – Cava Caveat Emptor

Flabby – a wine lacking the structural corset of acidity.

Karaoke wines – Wines that sing for your supper.

Rustic – a bucolic wine with nowt taken out probably made with minimal interference in the vineyard and vinified in a rusty shed inhabited by families of pigeons, rats, bats and other denizens of the wild.

Shallow – wine glossaries.

Stepford Wines – A wine programmed in a laboratory to be stable, functional and devoid of personality.

Süssreserve – An unnumbered Swiss bank account where all grape must is stored

Underwined Oak – Also known as ‘chips in everything’.

Vilification – The process where good wine is unmade in the winery.

Vin Grisly – rosé which has gone beyond the pale.

Vin de Table – Wine which will drink you under the table (Harry Eyres – The Bluffer’s Guide To Wine)

Zinfandel – Not the last grape in the alphabet (that special honour belongs to the Austrian Zweigelt grape. It comes in two incarnations: vile blush and the big rich bastard who lives on the hill. DNA fingerprinting suggests that Zinfandel is the same as the artery-hardening-to-pronounce Crljenak Kastelanski, a little known Croatian grape variety. Whatever. Capable of producing fine wines in the right hands (Paul Draper, Helen Turley and John Williams), when yields are low, otherwise can be hot and stewed. As Byron almost said, sometimes zin’s a pleasure. Described by one wine writer as the Harley Davidson of grape varieties, I would say its blush version more closely resembled the Jim Davidson of grape varieties.
 

 (Author's name and address supplied on request)