Found in Translation

Bordeaux Without Borders
Translation affects all kinds of tastes. Consider the following:
Pale gold in color, this wine smells of white flowers and lemon curd, with a hint of sweet oak.
It offers an explosion of crushed wet rocks in the mouth. The tender and beautifully filigreed
flavors of tart unripe apples and lemon curd vie for attention. Beautifully bright acidity zips
the wine along the palate, leaving a waxy parchment quality in the lingering finish.
So reads a typical description of a newly launched wine. For those who are not
connoisseurs of wine, it might as well be written in a foreign language.
Few and far between are the people whose taste buds are so finely tuned to
the breadth of wine flavors that they can write about it with such detail and

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flair, even in their native language. Likewise, there are only a select number of
translators in the world who specialize in rendering wine-related content into
other languages. This work requires fluency in two tongues, but one could
argue that the wine-focused translator also needs a third tongue, one that is
highly sensitive to the spectrum of tastes that exist among reds, whites, rosés,
and sparkling wines.
Why, you may ask, does the wine industry need translation? The demand for
translated wine-related information spans a greater number of areas than you
might realize. Think beyond the bottle itself and its labeling, which requires
translation of the ingredients for export into most countries. Consider all the
legal aspects, such as patents for winemaking equipment, technical standards
for winemaking from dozens of countries, legislation and trade disputes, and
geographical indications. And there are the business documents—harvest
production reports, partnership agreements with distributors, and
export/import documentation.
Then comes advertising, from magazine ads to commercials and online
videos that are launched by wineries from other countries. There are also
websites for wineries with content that must be translated. For example, Ernest
& Julio Gallo’s online property is available in seven languages—Chinese,
English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. Once a wine is
launched, the tasting notes from award-winning sommeliers and reviews in
leading fine wine publications also need to be translated in order for the
winery to gauge the success of the wine, and to repurpose those reviews for
additional advertising and marketing opportunities.
Kirk Anderson translates all of these types of texts, but the tasting notes are
his favorite type of project because they allow him to use the skills and
knowledge he has accumulated over the course of nearly two decades.
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care that he takes with selecting his words reflects the attention with which he
chooses a wine. Kirk, a trained sommelier, is the first to admit that tasting notes
often sound like nonsense to the nonenthusiast. However, he emphasizes that
the accurate translation of flavors, aromas, and colors used to describe the
wine is critical. This detail provides readers with important insight into the
techniques, region, process, and aging used to bring the wine from the
vineyard to the glass.
“Calling a Chardonnay buttery may sound patently absurd to some, but it’s a
clear sign that the wine has undergone malolactic fermentation, transforming
the malic acid, that often offers a hint of the aroma and bite of a Granny Smith
apple, into lactic acid, common in dairy products,” Kirk explains. He adds,
“Nuanced colors in a wine indicate aging, so you can be pretty confident that a

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more opaque red wine is younger than one that ‘fades to garnet at the rim.’” As
a professional translator, he takes his subject matter seriously.
While the flavor-related terms can border on the poetic, making them both
fun and challenging to translate, Kirk has noticed a new trend in his wine-
focused translation work. Increasingly, wine descriptions are focusing more
on the vineyard itself. “Arguably, the best wines are grown, not produced in the
winery, so being able to write intelligently about wine-growing techniques is
rapidly becoming essential for translators in this field.” In addition to knowing
how to say things like biscuity, plummy, and fleshy without making them sound
ridiculous in another language, translators like Kirk also need knowledge in
agricultural terminology that includes soil types, trellising techniques, and
grafting. Indeed, wine translation has an expansive scope that spans everything
from the field to the table.
So keep this in mind the next time you raise your next glass of imported
wine: from the label on the bottle down to the machine used to plow the fields
where the grapes were grown, every last drop reaches your lips thanks to
translation.