Top 10 Obnoxious Wine Terms That Need To Go Away According To Me

Every specialized hobby, career, world what have you develops its own terminology and jargon. They also can appropriate words used for other things to whatever they are involved in. Sometimes when everyone starts using these terms become ubiquitous, played out and ultimately obnoxious. Everyone will know most, if not all of these. I'll admit that I'm guilty as well for using a few of these but am consciously trying to cut back. I don't want to sound like an obnoxious wine douche if I don't have to. These are in no particular order. But I did jot them down in this order so take what you want from that.

1. Crushing It - This one has been gaining lots of traction recently because of the obvious double entendre. Crushing refers to when the grapes to make wine are crushed. When someone is doing well or has a proven track record of doing well they are crushing it. It also can refer to drinking great wines. Yet another in a long line of the 675 terms we have for drinking wine. Examples help. "I've been crushing it at Fass Selections for 3 years. Crushing it hard." "Hey, Aubert de Villaine, continue to crush it at DRC." "I just crushed some Prevost, Fourrier and Clos Rougeard last night." "Keep crushing it at restaurant X." You get the point. It needs to die a quick death. Which leads me to my next one.

2. Killing It - This is like crushing it but evokes a more provocative intensity. "I absolutely killed the MS Tasting section." "We killed a jero of 71 Dom last night." "Magnus Larson is killing it at Faviken." Killing it is not unique to the wine world but it has been picked up in the vernacular.

3. Natural Wine - Maybe the most provocative of them all. Ever since the term natural wine came to be it has created a clusterfuck of biblical proportions in the wine world. I swear someone has declared a fatwa on Alice Feiring. But if not it surely will happen shortly. It just needs to go away. If a term is introduced and you spend the next 10 years arguing about what it means, there is absolutely no consensus and it creates more heat than light, it's time to put it to bed.

4. Good juice - This is like the way bros describe wine. I hate this. I've used it in super rare situations where I'm tired and being lazy and don't want to describe the wine in any great detail. It is a disengaging term I find. It literally means nothing. It's lazy and is just wasting all our time. When people tried to sell me wine and say it's good juice I rolled my eyes.

5.  Dry - WTF does this mean? Absolutely nothing! With apologies to Edwin Starr. This is another term that means nothing. This is not really pervasive in the wine business but is pervasive in people who know nothing about wine. It's out there because many wines say "dry red wine" "dry table wine" on the bottle. People see dry and think that if wine is dry then there must be sweet wine. Then wine is divided into dry and sweet as that is simple for the beginning wine drinker. But it is a false paradigm and then they need to be reeducated that dry and sweet are not opposite and dry is a stupid word that needs to go away because all it does is confuse people trying to get into wine.

6.  Unicorn - Unicorn wine is the only term on this list that originated as a hashtag. It refers to a very hard to get wine that it is almost mythical because no one has seen a bottle and it is almost impossible to get due to high quality and small production. But of course it has gotten completely overused that its original definition has become lost as many people have appropriated it for wines that are not unicorn wines. Your 500 bottle Verduno Pelaverga is not a unicorn wine. Sorry. Nor is anything that is small production that you think is cool.  Marcel Juge who is super desirable, makes almost no wine and one store in the States has it?  That’s a unicorn.

7.  Burgundian - I'm Guilty of it. But I will include myself in the vinous basket of deplorables that way overuse this and misappropriate it so much that it sounds ultra obnoxious and has lost its original meaning. For me the original meaning is that  Pinot Noir NOT from Burgundy has an earthiness or minerality that reminds one of Burgundy. It can be also used to describe Nebbiolo, Gamay, Syrah and Chardonnay to a lesser extent. It’s a bad term as Burgundy is so varied with hundreds of unique terroirs but also is short shrifts other wine regions striving to find an identity. German Pinot Noir has many distinct terroirs and an earthy/mineral character that are distinctly German. I would not describe any German Pinot Noir as Burgundian.

8. Labor of Love - Please no more with this one. Oh, how noble we are, that we are selling wine that is a labor of love. I surely don’t want to buy or drink wine that is a labor of hate. Or worse, made with lazy hatred. This is so utterly ridiculous. There is labor, surely, but also, these winemakers need to make money, so labor of love generally is at best misleading and at worst plain false.

9. Small Production - Is it 200 bottles? Is it 5,000 cases? Is it a small house in Champagne only making 100,000 bottles? It’s all relative until you let people know how many bottles small production actually is. I’ve seen this term used by multi national drinks conglomerates using it to market, The term is trash and has no meaning unless it is backed up by real numbers.

10. Artisanal - I knew that this word had run it’s course when I saw it used to describe the chicken in a sandwich at the Smithsonian McDonalds (I am not kidding).  In theory, the term should a great one but it has become so overused that it has become all but meaningless.