GOOD wines have stories to tell, but sadly, they are at a loss for words. As articulate as a fine wine may be, it is left to humans to supply the translation.  Yet certain words in the lexicon of wine are prisoners of their own connotations, robbed of their meanings because they so readily touch off prejudicial thoughts or emotions. This gives added responsibility not just to writers, but to sommeliers, merchants and anyone else who seeks to make concrete what is essentially elusive, to ensure that they are heard without distortion.  Here are five words often used to describe wine, along with an effort to liberate them from their connotations.  BITTER It is not wine writers but history and human nature that give bitterness its biblically negative meaning. What would many dry red wines be, particularly those from Italy and parts of France, without their element of mild bitterness? Certainly not refreshing. A touch of bitterness can help frame and shape a wine. Along with acidity, it adds snap and zest, tapering off one sip and inviting the next. White wines, too, use mildly bitter flavors to their advantage.  We’re conditioned to avoid bitterness and certainly bitterness in wine is a bad thing sometimes. Wood tannins from new oak barrels can be overwhelmingly bitter, and too much bitterness of any kind means a wine is out of balance. But a little bitterness can be desirable, so don’t shrink back at the sound of the word. After all, what’s more refreshing than a cold (bitter) beer? And speaking of cold ...  COLD “Would you like me to put that bottle on ice for you?” the waiter asks. “No!” is often the correct response.  Americans love ice and cold. Beer commercials, those windows into the American psyche, reinforce that, and most sommeliers, who know better, nonetheless play to customer expectations by offering to keep already frigid bottles of white wine on ice. Yet if it’s a good bottle, keeping it too cold will rob you of a significant part of the pleasure.  The chill narrows the bandwidth of flavors, diminishing complexity, compressing expression. Bad wines benefit; the cold hides flaws, but good white wines need to warm up to give you all they’ve got. This goes for sparkling wines, too. Conversely, you might want to call for ice when ordering red wine, which so often is served too warm. The ideal serving temperature for good reds and whites merges at just a bit cooler than room temperature.  DARK The color of a red wine can offer many clues to how it was made and how it is aging. But many consumers have come to associate darker colors with higher quality, and some winemakers cater to this association.  Red wines come in myriad hues depending on the grapes, and rarely does darkness correlate with concentration and quality. Consider that nebbiolo and pinot noir wines, which can be intense and long-lasting, are naturally fairly pale. Some producers, anticipating consumer reaction, take steps to darken the wines with additives or even other grapes. Sangiovese wines may be a little darker, but not nearly as dark as some of the Chiantis or Brunellos di Montalcino on the shelves.  The bottom line: darkness in a red wine may mean a lot of things, but only rarely does darker mean better.  GREEN Many California cabernet producers fear nothing so much as hearing their wines described as green. Somehow in the last 20 years, the spectrum of herbal flavors that historically gave accent and complexity to cabernet sauvignons came to be regarded as the equivalent of a curse from the ratings gods, and so the public, too, has come to fear the specter of green.  It’s perhaps not the only reason for the plague of monochromatic fruity confections that have dominated California red wine production in recent years, but it’s a significant one. And it’s not just cabernet. Syrah, cabernet franc, pinot noir and numerous white wines, too, all benefit from herbal flavors that are lumped together under the dreaded “green” descriptor. Thankfully, a slim minority of California producers never succumbed to the overly fruity fashion, and now the stylistic pendulum is retreating to the point where it’s becoming easier to find red wines possessing a broader range of flavors.  California is foremost, but not the only region affected. A comparison of southern Rhone wines today with those made 15 years ago will indicate a far higher percentage of fruity wines without the herbal underpinning that was once characteristic of, say, Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Herbal flavors can be found in good, fruity Beaujolais (along with a touch of bitterness), while red cabernet franc wines from the Loire Valley can even have an attractive hint of bell pepper. Overly vegetative, unripe flavors are, of course, to be avoided, but fear not the green.  OAK Few wine words are as instantly polarizing as oak. For a mass audience oak flavors appear to be catnip, which is why so many producers — and not just industrial ones — take shortcuts to add them to their wines. Yet, for many discerning wine lovers, the flavors of oak are a bane. The result is often an all-or-nothing, take-it-or-leave-it attitude.  Some producers try to capitalize by marketing wines as “No Oak” or “Steel Tank,” an alternative with its own set of benefits and disadvantages. But this marketing is disingenuous.  Count me among those who find little to love in the overbearing flavor of oak. Yet the effects of aging a wine in oak barrels extend far beyond flavoring. Oak allows a subtle, minute interchange of air, which can affect the texture of wine and improve its ability to age. Using older, neutral barrels or bigger barrels can do this without the garish veneer of aromas and flavors.  In the end, the problem is not oak, but how winemakers use it.
In describing wines, some words have unjustly negative connotations. A âbitterâ or âgreenâ wine can actually be a good one.