Brendan Carter thinks the word ‘ethereal’ is one of the dumbest words in wine.
While studying, he “grabbed every single tasting note,” from a year’s worth of a top wine publication, “wrote them out one by one, put them in an Excel spreadsheet and fed it into Chat-GPT to find out what the most common terms were.”
The top three terms were ‘ethereal’, ‘juicy’ and ‘expressive’, none of which Carter thinks are helpful. Worse, he thinks wine writing is irrelevant to a younger audience. Not because of the vocabulary — be warned: this next bit will horrify wine writers everywhere — but because younger people are sceptical about the written word.
“People can hide behind words,” he says, while individual personalities who can be seen and heard are seen as inherently more trustworthy.
Carter is speaking from his purple-lit YouTube studio in the Adelaide Hills. He’s baffled that the wine industry is ignoring video, which is where the next generation is congregating.
This article first appeared in Meininger’s International. You can read the rest of the article here.
