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Professor Yuko Yoshinari's interest in unique expressions used to describe wine aromas and flavors was sparked by wine journals.

I have been extensively researching the subject called, "Cognitive Linguistics." It is a study about how people understand the situations they are in and translate them into their languages.
One of my latest research themes is Japanese expressions and idioms to describe the aromas and flavors of wines. I personally love to enjoy wines and while reading a wine journal called, "Real Wine Guide," (I am a subscriber of this journal, too), I came across many intriguing wine related expressions such as "velvet-like astringency," "pleasant cooling sensation," and "mildness spreading throughout my mouth." Since there are not so many Japanese adjectives for tastes and smells, new adjectives have been created by borrowing words from outside the realm of wines, and some metaphors are taking the place of conventional adjectives, which is not limited to Japanese, according to linguists in other countries.

It is well known that wine sommeliers express aromas and flavors with a variety of words and idioms, but few studies have been carried out on expressions dedicated to wines. Therefore, I decided to launch my research on the specific features of Japanese to describe wine tasting.

Various "Wine Tasting Notes," a record of the characteristics of wines and people's impressions of wines show us the amount of acid and tannin contained in wines and its correlation to flavors and tastes. I extracted and analyzed the expressions with "acid," "mineral" and "tannin," from 1,010 comments and messages run by several wine journals randomly. Additionally, I investigated how "acid," "mineral," and "tannin" are described for tea, coffee and fruits by using a database called "Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ)" (database for 104.3 million words).

Distinctive Expressions That Conjure Up Wine Aromas and Flavors

When I compared the following two types of data, I came across many unique Japanese words in wine tasting. First, I present some expressions for general food and drinks; many objective expressions are used such as "rich in minerals," "contain a large volume of tannin," and "strong acid."
Second, adjectives used for optical sensation; I found some rather subjective expressions in some Wine Tasting Notes such as "beautiful minerals" and "cute acid." I also noticed some eye-catching expressions including "acid gives a wine some dimensions" and "crisp tannin." Japanese that give words to invisible substances and personification of wines help us stretch our imagination about wine's aromas and flavors. This is also the real beauty of Japanese.

Many of us simply say, "This wine tastes good," but if we spend some time contemplating about their aromas and flavors, we may come up with more attractive Japanese for them. We can enjoy wines more than ever while inventing rich and unique Japanese vocabulary for wine tasting.