More shit written on wine labels *

Back in August of last year Old Parn drew our attention to some of the awful, witless shit-crap you may occasionally be unfortunate enough to read on the label of your wine bottle. You know the sort of guff: the mere pretentiousness of things like, "Seductive spicy notes played by the Shiraz, harmonised by the floral, violet undertones of the Viognier. Culminating in a symphony of flavours." Through to the malfunctioning Babelfish of, "garnet rims and purple glints," and, "good backbone and fleshy to the mount".

Well. I went to a little London food and wine event a couple of months ago with @crepple, organised by and for producers from Puglia.

I met one of the wine producers; he was a jolly likable fellow, and his wines (mainly reds) were fairly nice, if not outstanding. I took his wee brochure away with me. Here are some of the descriptions therein:

"Is a very great red wine. It has color red ruby with purplish reflexes. The perfume and ethereal and persistent, the taste, justly tannico warm and harmonic with notes of leather and of spice." (I swear I've transcribed that exactly as it appeared.) 

"Gotten by the grape of Troia and Merlot, it has color red ruby, perfume yielded with signs of forest fruits, soft and harmonic taste with a good fullness gustativa." 

"The taste is dry, with an acido/tanico equilibrium." 

And so, incomprehensibly, on.

Aye, so we could snigger at this unfortunate gibberish, but do you know what? The wines are decent. They deserve an audience. So why not -- at the very least -- ask at least one relatively literate mother tongue speaker to read your copy before publishing it on an internet, or in a brochure? I might actually drop them a message, you know, and -- politely, mind -- ask them to revisit their copy in the presence of someone who could successfully express the sense of "justly tannico warm" in clear, elegant English.

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* My title is a modified version of one written by Old Parn himself.