December 27, 2010

"It's so easy when you know the language" - Martin Mull

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Elaboration


The act or process of producing, refining or improvement.
Also a term used to describe the entire winemaking process, from grape to bottle.

After a rather impressive start some 7-8 years ago, my newsletter went from a somewhat reliable publication to something that appeared with roughly the frequency of Halley’s Comet. To be honest, I simply ran out of things to write about. I don’t mind confessing that because I am not a work-a-day journalist with a gift for pulling topics out of thin air whatever the weather.

No, my newsletter was not journalism. It was a chronicling of my journey of discovery. Can we then conclude that I’ve discovered all there is to know about wine? Far from it. But I have run out of topics that require the all-consuming research that I’m inclined to do. Plus I am loath to fall into that habit of seasoned journalists of revisiting topics -- that does not interest me.

Thankfully I have hit upon an idea that I think I can warm up to. It appears that I am the definitive keeper of wine language (at least, in North America). My is still the most complete collection of wine terms available, so I’m going to run with that. My goal with the Lexicon was to provide dictionary-length definitions of the most common wine terms. Of course there’s more to any story, so what I’d like to do here is to occasionally pull out one of those wine terms and then elaborate on it. With nearly 650 terms in the Lexicon, I figure I’m good for about 12 years before I have to roll out a Volume II of the Lexicon. (Just kidding: Volume II is in the works.)
 

-TFO