Sommelier Speak

Yes, ripening.

"Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine."

— Fran Lebowitz

(Note that the first word in the trope name is pronounced "som-uh-lyeh.")

In fiction and satire, if someone is called upon to describe the flavor, scent and color of a wine, they will begin speaking in a kind of pretentious Purple Prose which may include any of the following:

• Sesquipedalianly loquacious gushing or ranting, often with name-dropping of European grape varieties such as Beaujolais, Côtes du Rhône, Merlot, and Zinfandel and showing off knowledge of famous vintages ("it has a nose like a 1999 Lafite-Rothschild").
• They may describe their lengthy and complex tasting procedure, which involves swirling the glass, sniffing it, holding it up to the light, and sipping it delicately.
• Elaborate, perhaps mixed, metaphors, sometimes even incorporating Faux Symbolism to give more gravitas to the wine tasting.
• Claiming to be able to discern specific variables affecting the grapes that made the wine just from a taste, including: wind, shade, rain, drainage, soil type, soil acidity, mold, and insect activity in the growing season.
• Personification of the wine, ascribing to it personality traits, poetically-described moods, and even moral agency.
• Tastes Like Feet, except not necessarily negative: even an admirable wine may be compared to metal, tobacco, pee, gasoline, or the like.
• Stock phrases, "A good year" being especially common.
• Using the traditional names for sizes of wine bottles derived from the names of figures from The Bible: e.g. a "Methuselah" for a 6-liter bottle, a "Nebuchadnezzar" for a 15-liter, and a "Melchizedek" for a 30-liter.

A variant combines this with I Ate WHAT?! — another substance is mistaken for, or passed off as, wine, and the unwitting drinker describes it in similar terms. And see also Expensive Glass of Crap.

Partial Truth in Television, as detailed in this article. Wine is complex (often several flavour notes will be in the same one, and the combinations can sound discordant, like black cherry/pepper/tobacco) and volatile (the lingering taste in the drinker's mouth, called the "finish," can be different than the initial sensations), and chemical analysis of wine shows that the descriptors fairly consistently refer to the same flavor/aroma compounds. It is also important to note that the terms used to describe wine flavors, like "black cherry" or "plum," do not necessarily mean that the wine tastes like those things — rather, these are agreed-upon terms for specific but hard-to-articulate flavors; The Other Wiki has a glossary. This is not helped by the fact that some people's palates detect tannins more strongly than others, which can result in all alcoholic beverages just tasting of tannins and alcohol, no matter how a sommelier might describe it.

Basically, wine critics are wrestling with the same problem as the makers of perfume commercials, i.e. attempting to describe the characteristics of something in a medium ill-suited for the job. (See also It Tastes Like Feet for the Evil Twin to this.) Not surprisingly, the end results are similar.

While most commonly seen with wine (because Wine Is Classy), the terminology is used for other drinks (including tea, coffee, beer, spirits, and cocktails), with variations.^note For instance, even amateur spirit/cocktail tasters frequently reference "rum funk," a sort of overripe-banana-plus-fermenting-vegetation note that appears mostly in aged and cane-juice rums (particularly ones from the English-speaking Caribbean and most especially from Jamaica and Barbados) but can also show up in whisk(e)y and brandy, but a typical wine sommelier won't have a clue what you mean because that note is very rare in wine. Similar to Hash House Lingo, which also involves a particular jargon for culinary concepts.

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Examples:

Advertising

• There was an advert for Gordon's Gin in the UK where a very pretentious guy at a garden party was going on about a glass of wine having aromas of things like wood pigeon and pebbles in the rain and being mocked by two nearby gin and tonic drinkers.
• A commercial plays on this, with an older Italian man and his assistant tapping a cask. The man holds the glass up to the light, "Muddy." He takes a sniff, "Pungent." He takes a sip and immediately spits it out, "Sour." Then he smiles and says, "It's perfect." The narrator then lets the audience know this is a commercial for balsamic vinegar. (Yes, they do do this. The standards for aceto balsamico tradizionale—the Real Thing when it comes to balsamic vinegar—are extremely exacting, and even the higher-end stuff among the non-tradizionale is treated with care and tasted for grading purposes before distribution.)
• Bud Light had a commercial where snooty mead connoisseurs keep telling the king how he's supposed to enjoy the mead they brought without ever allowing him to actually taste it. Eventually the king gets sick of it, tosses the snobs in the dungeon, and orders a beer.
• An old commercial for an online bank featured a guy trying this, only he's a Know-Nothing Know-It-All and claims that Pinot Noir means "peanut of the night."

Anime & Manga

• The Drops of God is a manga about wine tasting and serving that is memetic for trying too hard to make being a sommelier sound awesome, and naturally is drowning in this, with the protagonist having LSD-like visions from the wine flavors. He is on a quest to find twelve wines that are described by comparing their flavors to Jesus' apostles.
• Subverted in One Piece where Marine Lieutenant Fullbody has a restaurant deliver a specific kind of wine to him and his date so he can impress her by pretending to identify it in this manner. Unfortunately for him, his waiter happens to be Sanji, who gives him a completely different wine instead and causes him to humiliate himself.
• Pokémon the Series: Black & White: This is how Cilan talks about Pokémon in general. That's because he is a "Pokémon Sommelier" (or, in the dub, "Pokémon Connoisseur").
• One scene in Hellsing has a vampire use such speech to describe and then identify the blood type of a man he just killed, with one of his colleagues confirming his assessment by reading the body's dog tags.

Comic Books

• "The Real Ale Twats" from Viz will often describe beer as "redolent" of something bizarre, its (usually high) abv as 'feisty' or 'formidable', and it will invariably remind them of something they tried years before at a beer festival, and the specific odd behavior resulting from overindulging on it.

Comic Strips

• A classic James Thurber cartoon from The New Yorker: "It's a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption."
• In one Peanuts strip, when Charlie Brown is going out to buy Sally an ice cream cone, she asks for chocolate and vanilla, with chocolate on the top.
  Charlie Brown: What difference does that make?
  Sally: It makes all the difference in the world. If the vanilla is on the bottom it leaves a better aftertaste.
  Charlie Brown: Little Did I Know that in our own home we had a connoisseur of ice-cream cones.

Films — Animation

• Played with in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, when Esmerelda uses wine as an antiseptic, and Phoebus identifies the vintage by the way it stings in his wound.
  Phoebus: Agh! Feels like a 1470 Burgundy. Not a good year.
• In The Boxtrolls, the citizens of Cheesebridge speak this way in regards to fine cheese.
• In The Batman vs. Dracula, the Joker pauses in his blood drinking to admire the flavour:
  A bold finish of wild cherries with a hint of oak.
• Schmendrick gets in on this in The Last Unicorn while trying to fool a skeleton into thinking he can turn water into wine.
  Schmendrick: (having drunk the quote-unquote ‘wine’) Mff… didn’t work. It’s weak at best. (makes a show of sniffing the neck of the bottle) No nose, no body, hardly any bouquet at all…

Films — Live-Action

• Miles, the protagonist of the film Sideways, is a wine enthusiast who often uses metaphors like these.
• The French movie The Wing or the Thigh uses this when the main character has been challenged to prove his culinary expertise by identifying a wine on TV. Unbeknownst to the audience (but not to the bad guy), he has lost his sense of taste and must rely on other descriptors like color, transparency, and viscosity to pull it off, spouting all the usual phrases.
• Ralphie in A Christmas Story is the kind of boy who regularly gets his mouth washed out with soap, and briefly talks like this when describing how a specific brand tastes.
  "Over the years, I got to be quite a connoisseur of soap. My personal preference was for Lux, but I found Palmolive had a nice, piquant after-dinner flavor; heady, but with just a touch of mellow smoothness. Lifebuoy, on the other hand..."
• The Sommelier in John Wick: Chapter 2 describes the guns he sells exactly the same way he would describe wines.
  "I know of your past fondness for the German varietals, but I can wholeheartedly endorse the new breed of Austrians: Glock 34 and 26."
• The Neverending Story: In the first scene in Fantasia, the Rock Biter describes limestone rocks the way wine is described.
  Rock Biter: A delicious-looking limestone rock. Mmm! Mmm! Nice bouquet. Must be a real vintage year.
• Spy: In a scene where the protagonist Susan Cooper is dining at a fancy restaurant with the sophisticated crime boss Rayna Boyanova, Susan attempts to impress Rayna by asking for wine in a needlessly vague and flowery way that she thinks makes it seem like she's a big wine connoisseur, but it only causes Rayna and the waiter to look at each other in confusion.
• The Parent Trap (1998): The twins' father owns a vineyard which means Hallie, who lives with him, has picked up a lot of wine-tasting lingo. While posing as Annie she asks for a sip of her mother's wine and almost blows the Twin Switch by giving a thorough review of the taste and comparing it to other grapes. Hallie attempts to cover by claiming she picked up the knowledge while at summer camp.
• Parodied in The World's End when Gary King walks into the first of many bars on his crawl and expects the bartender to describe his drinks in this way, only for him to simply answer 'its beer'. One of the first signs things are wrong with the town in a much later bar is when a different bartender describes his alcohol using the exact same terms Gary suggested several hours earlier.

Literature

• In the Roald Dahl story "Taste," the villain does this as part of a drawn-out display of identifying a wine. Earlier in the story, it is noted that this is an idiosyncrasy of his:
  ... when discussing a wine, he had a curious, rather droll habit of referring to it as though it were a living being. "A prudent wine," he would say, "rather diffident and evasive, but quite prudent." Or, "A good-humoured wine, benevolent and cheerful — slightly obscene, perhaps, but none the less good-humoured."
• Dave Barry has mocked this a few times. In particular, when he attended a sommelier competition (as described in this column), he had this to say:
  The people at my table, on the other hand, leaned more toward the slosh-and-sniff approach, where you don't so much drink the wine as you frown and make a thoughtful remark about it such as you might make about a job applicant ("I find it ambitious, but somewhat strident." Or: "It's lucid, yes, but almost Episcopalian in its predictability.") As it happened, I was sitting next to a French person named Mary, and I asked her if people in France carry on this way about wine. "No," she said, "they just drink it. They're more used to it."
• A Dorothy L. Sayers short story "The Bibulous Business of a Matter of Taste" has three men all claiming to be Lord Peter Wimsey. Who is the real one is determined by a wine taste-off.
• Vlad Taltos slips into this as he's waxing poetical about Valabar's cuisine and wine selections in Dzur.
• Averted in the Dragonriders of Pern series with wine enthusist Masterharper Robinton. He tends to describe wines in terms of "Benden White" and "not Benden White." Though he can, through a single mouthful, identify the year of any given glass of wine, and sometimes what part of the vineyard the grapes came from.
• Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess: The protagonist's boyfriend likes to party this sort of talk. "From the north end of the vineyard, where the diabetic tomcat pisses against the wall."
• The Stupidest Angel features a kid who likes parroting Sommelier Speak to flummox adults. Unfortunately the guy he learned it from doubled as Sir Swears-a-Lot, so flummoxed his parents a bit more than he bargained for when he called something a "tenacious little [Country Matters] of a red".
• Hugely parodied in Sylvie and Bruno: When the ladies withdraw after dinner, a "pompous man" says that one can only discuss "trivial topics" such as art, literature, and politics with the ladies, but now they can talk about WINE. The narrator quickly falls into a dream state, where he imagines them instead talking about different flavours of jam with the same seriousness. Upon waking, he reflects on how ridiculous such a thing would be in reality; discussing mere delicacies as if they were matters of life and death.
• Stick Dog: Whenever Poo-Poo tastes something new in the books, he goes into great, sophisticated detail describing the taste to his friends.
• Bruce Feirstein skewers this behavior in his satirical book Real Men Don't Eat Quiche:
  "Real Men don't play games in restaurants; they don't sniff the cork and say things like 'It's a small, unpretentious, fruity red with ambitious overtones of Bordeaux' about a four-dollar bottle of Ripple."
• Discworld: Mrs Bradshaw's Guidebook to the Ankh-Morpork and Sto Plains Hygenic Railway includes a facsimile of the wine list at Scoffer's restaurant, which describes all the wines in slightly absurd terms, especially since some of them possibly aren't great wines (one is actually called Vin d'Gar and has "nuances of matches and pickled eggs"). Another is Sorbumme Creek, named after the Quirmian branch of the Fools' Guild, and has a "cherry nose".
• Parodied in The Cat Who Could Read Backwards, the first book of The Cat Who... Series. Qwilleran visits the Press Club, sits down next to Arch Riker and Odd Bunsen, and being permanently on the wagon, orders what is described as his "usual tomato juice." Riker comments that he must be quite the connoisseur of it. In response, Qwilleran runs the glass under his nose, then replies "An unpretentious vintage. Nothing memorable, but it has a naive charm. Unfortunately, the bouquet is masked by the smoke from Mr. Bunsen's cigar. I would guess the tomatoes came from... from Northern Illinois. Obviously a tomato patch near an irrigation ditch, getting the morning sun from the east and the afternoon sun from the west. My palate tells me the tomatoes were picked early in the day—on a Tuesday or Wednesday—by a farmhand wearing a Band-Aid. The Mercurochrome comes through in the aftertaste."

Live-Action TV

• Go On: Ryan enjoys going to wine country and trolling the wine connoisseurs by picking a theme with which to discuss the wine. In the one episode we see it, he describes wine using the names of dwarfs.
• Also, note the sheer number of Frasier episodes where Frasier and Niles talk wine — the episodes where they are competing against each other in tasting competitions, for instance. In one episode Frasier prepares a lengthy review for a new segment of his radio show, going into specific detail about the vanilla taste of the wine in question, and asks his father if it's "too subtle".
  Martin: No, it's not too subtle. Unless you want them to know what the hell you're talking about.
  Frasier: Well, you don't think it's clear I enjoyed the wine?
  Martin: I don't think it's clear you're talking about wine.
• Oz and James pairs renowned wine critic Oz Clarke with car reviewer James May, the former attempting to teach the latter how to do this. The reluctant James often lampshades it by introducing and referring to Oz as Oz "Woody High-Notes" Clarke on this show and other series the two have done together...
• Speaking of which, James May's Man Lab had Oz attempt to assist hapless researcher Rory into bluffing his way through a wine tasting using Sommelier Speak, via earpiece. While Rory (and Oz) guess all of the red wines correctly, they also fail to identify any of the white wines.
• In an infamous lost sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus a man brings his friend down to his wine cellar for a private tasting. After the visitor describes the various flavors and textures he notices, the man tells him it's "wee-wee." All the wine is wee-wee.
• Blackadder II: After sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, Blackadder returns to the Queen, who insists that he give her, Melchett, and Sir Walter Raleigh gifts from his trip or she'll chop his head off. Thinking quickly, he produces a bottle of Baldrick's urine (the group had been forced to drink their own urine to keep from dying of thirst) for Melchett and Sir Walter. Sir Walter describes it having "plenty of nose" and Melchett says it smells "familiar."
• An episode of CSI: NY is based around the premise that some rare wine has been expertly faked (that is, cheap wine has been carefully flavored by an expert so it tastes like rare vintages). This trope happens a lot (mostly played for laughs, although the actual experts get some respect).
• The Office (US): In the episode "Pool Party," Oscar mistakenly thinks Toby is a wine connoisseur. Toby tries to keep up the charade:
  Oscar: What's compelling about this is the note of persimmon. Right?
  Toby: Note? It's...a symphony.
• Black Books:
  • In an episode where Bernard and Manny accidentally drink a ridiculously expensive bottle of wine belonging to a friend they're house-sitting for, Bernard consults the buyers' guide and takes an excessively literal approach to reproducing the flavors in a bottle of cheap plonk. For example, when the guide mentions "hints of oak", in go some twigs from the garden. In an epilogue, the finished product is presented as a gift to the Pope, and it kills him.
  • Dylan Moran, the star of Black Books himself, mercilessly mocks Sommelier Speak in this comedy routine.
• On Hotel Babylon, James has to take part in a wine-tasting competition but has no palate and knows nothing about wine (despite being the food and beverage manager of a five-star restaurant). Luckily for him, Ben knows plenty about wine and coaches him on how to speak about it in poetic terms.
• Parks and Recreation: Tom takes most of the department to a sommelier competition in the "Flu Season 2" episode so he can recruit the winner for his new restaurant. Craig joins the competition after revealing that he has a passion for wine tasting and April joins to Troll the judges.
  Craig: Pumpkin, undertones of lavender. Medium-plus body. It's mostly pumpkin. There's so much pumpkin, it's like a Charlie Brown Halloween special!
  April: I'm getting notes of dried robin's blood, old dirty cashews, and just a hint of a robot's bathwater.
• In an episode of White Collar, beer-drinking Straight Man Peter is forced to go undercover as a wine lover and must produce some Sommelier Speak. High-class, wine-loving Neal tries to cover for him, sure that it'll be a disaster... and then Peter plays his part perfectly, with excellent Sommelier Speak. (Turns out, Peter knows wine — as well he should, given that his wife works in the wine-crazy art world — he just isn't obsessed with it.)
• Doctor Who:
  • In "Day of the Daleks", the Third Doctor is staying in a Big Fancy House and can't help but dip into the wine cellar:
  A touch sardonic perhaps, but not cynical. Yes, a most civilised wine. One after my own heart.
  • In the story "City of Death", the Doctor compares Paris to a wine, saying (eventually, and after Romana has completed the sentence for him repeatedly) that it has a bouquet, but you have to choose the right year — and 1979 is "more of a table wine".
• Played for Laughs in Taxi. Latka's cookie recipe uses coca leaves as an ingredient (apparently, it's not illegal where he's from). "Reverend" Jim (a very deep fried survivor of the counterculture) walks up and inspects one of the cookies. He takes one sniff, detecting the "secret" ingredient. He crumbles a bit in his fingers, then snorts some of the crumbs. "Peru, I believe..." (takes a nibble) "Southern Peru...'74, before the rains..." (chews and swallows a larger bite) "Poignant, but not overbearing."
• In "A Bottle of Red, A Bottle of White" from Joe Schmo 2, the second season of The Joe Schmo Show (a parody reality show in which everyone except the chosen "schmoes" was an actor), the lack of this is Played for Laughs. The Reality TV Show Mansion used for the season is situated on a vineyard, so naturally they want to have a wine tasting. However, as explained by Kevin Kirkpatrick, who played Bryce, they weren't allowed to be too specific about anything, leading the host to explain things like, "We'll start with a chardonnay. Now the chardonnay is named after the grape..."
  Kevin: It was all the basics of "Chianti." "Cabernet." They might as well have just said, "Here's red. And something very different from red is white."

Music

• Lampooned in "The Wine Song", written by Grant Baynham, and later covered by Martin Pearson and Mike Agranoff.
  They waste their time describing what they ought to be imbibing, which is wine of course, although you'd never think it.
  'Cos they use words like "Young but promising ". "Precocious," "Full of fun"; You'd have thought they were going to adopt the stuff, not drink it

Podcasts

• From the Thrilling Adventure Hour episode "A Beyond Belief Valentines Day":
  Frank Doyle: I seek a wine with structure — and stability — and backbone. Something brooding, but which won't tell me what's on its mind. A wine that's superior, haughty, withholding. I want a wine so fickle and baffling I'll wake up at three in the morning with my fingers already fumbling on the dial of my phone to ask it what I've done wrong. I want a wine that disapproves of me and every choice I've made. Bring me a wine that insults me to my face and makes me like it!
  Maitre d': Ah! A French wine, then.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: The 2nd Edition adventure "A Brutal Finish" features a famous annual wine festival. Player characters take hefty social penalties unless they can wield the local wine-tasting jargon, which ranges from real-world descriptors to obliquely insulting in-universe allusions.
  "Now that's a Mousillon vintage." Revolting and likely to cause plague.

Theatre

• In A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (a comedy set during the Roman Empire), when Marcus Lycus offers Pseudolus some wine, Pseudolus looks at the bottle and asks, "Was 1 a good year?"
• In the Canadian one-man show Work, the protagonist recounts his brief stint as a sewer worker, in which his more senior colleagues talked this way about the stench coming out of an open manhole.
  "Kind of an oaky, nutty finish."

Video Games

• Parodied by Kingdom of Loathing with the "bottle of wine" item. When you drink it, the Lemony Narrator describes it as such:
  Narrator: It tastes like wine, with subtle overtones of wine, and also a faint aftertaste of wine.
• The Infernal Sommelier in Fallen London can be pretty unnerving when he does this, as he also talks about the taste of souls as well as wine, bringing up a slow slide into utter depression like it was a subtle taste of strawberry.
• In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, during a mead inspection, the head of Honningbrew Meadery tells the captain of the city guard that this particular brew is his finest yet and the captain will find it pleasing to the palate. The captain calls him out on this, saying "it's mead, not some wine to be sipped and savored."
• Whenever you buy a fancy drink in a bar in the Yakuza series, the bartender will give you elaborate descriptions about your drink.
  • Parodied in Kiwami, when Goro Majima gets behind the bar, and starts spouting this type of gibberish about what he later admits is "bottom-shelf hobo juice".
• Parodied in Two Point Hospital in-game radio show.
  Sir Nigel Bickleworth: And now, for "Sommelier Over the Rainbow", featuring the robust Spigot Noir. With bouquet of black figs and slightly used gym towels, this wine will simply knock your socks off. In fact, if I drink another glass, I may have to rename this segment "Sommelier Under the Table". *Alcohol Hic*
• In Hitman 3 in the Mendoza level, one way to get close to the target is for Agent 47 to impersonate the sommelier at the vineyard and decant an extremely rare bottle of wine for the target's meeting. As part of his disguise, 47 recites the apparently true history and flavor of the wine which he somehow knows.
  Agent 47: This... is the 1945 Grand Paladin, one of only five bottles in existence. The vintage is legendary, the proverbial unicorn wine. The year was hot, the wines' super-concentrated and thanks to hail and frost, the production was small. Only 300 bottles were ever produced, and when the vineyard was bombed in the closing days of World War II, only a single crate survived. It is said to have amazingly complex aromas, with long savory layers of fruit and spice flavors and a silky texture. Enjoy.
• Fire Emblem Engage Céline gets like this in regards to tea. In her support conversations with Etie, Céline can identify the origin of the leaves used from a single taste. Etie admits that while she enjoys tea, it all tastes the same to her. Céline readily admits it's an acquired skill but praises Etie (otherwise a Fitness Nut) for trying.
• Fable II: The Flavor Text for some wine bottles has fun with this trope:
  Box Wine: Evenly proportioned, almost hedonistic Voignier. Opens with pork rind, hairspray and hints of anise.
  Table Wine: Hints of vanilla, touches of oak, and whispers of fruity jam are purely imaginary in the bog-standard claret.
  Classy Claret: One would be able to detect hints of raspberry, honeydew and marmoset with one's nose, if one was a pompous ass.

Webcomics

• Used with craft beer in Dominic Deegan. During the "Vacation" arc, Luna revealed she had turned to Drowning My Sorrows at one point in her life, and learned to appreciate beer as more than just a vehicle for alcohol.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • The succubus Sabine sometimes taunts her enemies in combat by describing the tasting notes of the Life Energy she's draining off them.
  • During the Utterly Dwarfed arc, one of the vampires working under the High Priest of Hel talks in a similar fashion about the taste of the Orders' blood, whom they'd defeated in combat.
    Vampire: [drinking Elan's blood] Mmmmm! A simple but crisp, bold flavor, perfect for relaxing with friends. Delicious! Are the rest this tasty?
    [...]
    Vampire: [now drinking from Haley] Oh wow. Subtle, but with so many complex undertones. Seriously, Boss, I can't believe you ate this well on the flight up.
• Questionable Content:
  • Claire suddenly starts talking this way about Scotch, even though it's her second glass ever and the first only tasted "like horrible burning". Immediately Lampshaded:
    Maurice: She's a savant!
    Veronica: The sleeper has awakened!
  • One of the scientists on the space station invents a liqueur that causes drinkers to taste emotions rather than flavors. One of the test drinkers describes it this way, the other says it just tastes like awkwardly realizing your grandmother was racist.
• A Sarah's Scribbles strip presents a "There Are Two Kinds of People in the World "joke like this, with a snob going on and on about how good the wine is, and Sarah herself saying "Hmm yes, this wine tastes like wine."
• Parodied in Selkie when the title character gives a stereotypical "wine snob" speech about her cup of chai tea. However, the real goal is to distract Andi and keep her from worrying too much about Selkie not being human.
  Selkie: Goods body. Excelents vintage. 1922 was the bests year for this vineyard.
  Andi: Who taught you how to "wine snob"?

Web Original

• The Silly Tasting Notes Generator produces a short random instance of the style, in "Normal-silly" or "Extra-silly" flavors. The template is derived from actual Wine Spectator notes.
• This blog post by fantasy author/commentator Brian Stavely talks about descriptors of wine that don't really match up with any perception by the senses of the drinker — it's used as a metaphor for fantasy novels doing the same with language (i.e. saying a character is "dumb as a smeerp" has no real meaning for the audience since smeerps don't exist).
• Parodied at The Onion: "Potato Chip Connoisseur Detects Notes of Sour Cream, Onion"
• SCP Foundation: In Ambrose Transylvania, the blood served at the titular swanky hotel for vampires is described this way.
  I found the S'kakithi blood to be intolerably bitter, with strong smoke and almond notes. It was personally too strong for me, but I could see the appeal.
• Downplayed in The Whiskey Vault. In each episode, hosts Daniel and Rex go into detail about the odors and flavors they get out of the whiskeys they're sampling, along with some of the more intricate aspects such as finish and front or end notes. However, they're very down-to-earth and straightforward, and the pretentiousness and Purple Prose that's usually associated with the trope are nowhere to be found.
• Used for comedic effect at the end of Zero Punctuation's double review of Fortnite and DUSK, to emphasise how slim the pickings were in terms of concurrent games to review:
  Yahtzee: What else am I going to review? The smell of my dog's farts? Two stars: bold and earthy, with subtle notes of toilet water.
• Parodied in Strong Bad's ''Disk 4 of 12'' episode on Vampire's Castle. Strong Bad finds wine and cheddar cheese in the vampire's study, leading him to believe the vampire was going to hold a wine tasting. He then decides to have his own wine tasting in the alchemist's lab, only to discover that the game won't let him sample the wine. At the end of the video, Strong Bad and the Cheat have a wine tasting in the alchemist's lab with Ratt, and Strong Bad attempts to sound classy by invoking this trope.
  Strong Bad: Oh, the bouquet, and the brocade, and the pomade of this wine is exqueptional!

Western Animation

• Bob's Burgers: The B-plot of "The Kids Rob a Train" has Bob and Linda meet a wine connoisseur on a wine-tasting train ride. Bob hates him for his condescending attitude regarding Bob's tastes, but when he challenges Bob to a wine-identifying contest he realizes the guy isn't just blowing smoke. Bob is only able to beat him when Linda brings in a "special" wine that the sommelier never had before but Bob had: the various types of wine that were in one of the train's spittoons.
• The Pinky and the Brain episode "Around the World in 80 Narfs" has a waiter introduce a wine as "An amusing vintage with an excellent nose." "It also seems to have ears and a tail," replies the diner — as Pinky and the Brain have been bottled into the wine.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy: In "Shoo Ed", Rolf smells Jonny's stinky breath and notes "Anchovy paste, 1952. A fine year!".
• American Dad! episode "The Shrink" sees Roger and Klaus training to become professional wine tasters after being humiliated at a party. A blindfolded Roger samples a glass and seems to rattle off every possible adjective that comes to mind. A disappointed Klaus reveals that the "test wine" is just milk.
• An episode of Count Duckula tells of a family gathering at the castle and Duckula wants no part of it. The relatives regale in a blood-tasting session, describing what they're tasting in this manner.

Real Life

• TV wine pundit Jilly Goolden mastered this art — she either described wines to a high degree of fluency and vinocultured literacy, or else she spoke a lot of utter bollocks about plonk. Here's an example of her flowery speech, along with a touch of Food Porn. On the old BBC series Food And Drink, it's generally accepted (though never officially confirmed) that by the time of recording, she'd probably tasted a few wines too many.
• Some slobs have found a way to pull one over on the snobs: flick the glass and (pretend to) carefully listen to the tone this produces. Spouting nonsense about the clarity and note of the sound optional.

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