Wine and Conversation or Creative Quantity Cooking

Wine and Conversation

Author: Adrienne Lehrer

The vocabulary of wine is large and exceptionally vibrant -- from straight-forward descriptive words like "sweet" and "fragrant", colorful metaphors like "ostentatious" and "brash", to the more technical lexicon of biochemistry. The world of wine vocabulary is growing alongside the current popularity of wine itself, particularly as new words are employed by professional wine writers, who not only want to write interesting prose, but avoid repetition and cliche. The question is, what do these words mean? Can they actually reflect the objective characteristics of wine, and can two drinkers really use and understand these words in the same way?
In this second edition of Wine and Conversation, linguist Adrienne Lehrer explores whether or not wine drinkers (both novices and experts) can in fact understand wine words in the same way. Her conclusion, based on experimental results, is no. Even though experts do somewhat better than novices in some experiments, they tend to do well only on wines on which they are carefully trained and/or with which they are very familiar. Does this mean that the elaborate language we use to describe wine is essentially a charade? Lehrer shows that although scientific wine writing requires a precise and shared use of language, drinking wine and talking about it in casual, informal setting with friends is different, and the conversational goals include social bonding as well as communicating information about the wine. Lehrer also shows how language innovation and language play, clearly seen in the names of new wines and wineries, as well as wine descriptors, is yet another influence on the burgeoning and sometimes whimsical world of winevocabulary.

Table of Contents:

Preface and Acknowledgments

Part I. The Wine Vocabulary

1. The Early Wine Words

2. Extending the Vocabulary

3. New Wine Words

4. Aromas and Wine Wheels

5. Evaluating Wine: Scoring Systems

6:. Semantic analysis

Part II. The Experiments

7. Experiments and Subjects

8. The Stanford Subjects

9. The Tucson Subjects

10. The Davis Subjects

11. Later Experiments

12. Research on Taste and Smell

Part III. Functions of Wine Talk:

13. Functions of Language

14. Scientific Language

15. Non-Scientific Language

16. Snobs, Anti-Snobs, and Marketing

17. What Else is Like Wine Talk?

18. Conclusion

Appendix - A Semantic Theory by Adrienne Lehrer and Keith Lehrer

Endnotes

References

See also: Principles of Microeconomics or Introduction to Business

Creative Quantity Cooking

Author: Nell J McCormack

This thoughtfully written book provides guidelines for preparing food for 25, 50, and 75, while emphasizing flavor and attractiveness as well as health. The first reduced—sodium, reduced—fat, low—cost, quantity recipe book that addresses the preferences of individuals and specific groups. Provides a nutritional analysis with each recipe and suggestions for making each recipe flavorful with ingredients routinely kept on hand.