BBC 6分钟英语学习 葡萄酒的语言

English from BBC

Learning English. Hello. This is six minute English from BBC Learning English.

I'm Sam, and I'm Rob rub Would you describe yourself as a wine connoisseur?

If you mean, am I someone who enjoys wine and knows a lot about it, then no.

Although the enjoy part

is true, particularly a nice glass of red.

Of course, wine might not be everybody's cup of tea, not something they like, but wine has been an important part of history and language, and even if you don't drink alcohol, wine can be used as a commodity.

You can invest in and sell at an auction.

And that brings me to my quiz question.

Rob In 2018, a bottle of wine, dazing back to 1774, sold their auction in Eastern France for a record breaking price.

Do you know how much it was sold for?

Was it A 20800? B 120800 or C 220800?

I know one can fetch a high price, but not as high as some of those options.

So I'll say a $20800. I'll reveal the answer later on.

But let's talk more about wine now.

A glass of the stuff can be sipped and save it, or just gluged.

Ah, glug is a good word, meaning drink in large gulps or mouthfuls.

Not something a wine expert would too.

For some people, drinking and serving wine is almost an art form.

If you go to a restaurant, there might be a somelier, a person whose job is to serve and give advice about wine.

They may have had years of training to learn about the different types of wine and the individual flavors, or aromas, known as notes.

This job has fascinated journalist and author Bianca Boscar.

She wrote a book called Cork Dogs.

And here she is talking on the BBC World Service program The Wife Factor, describing her fascination with Somilias.

These were people who had taken wine, which I had always thought of as a thing of pleasure, something you turned to after a long, stressful day and turned it into something approaching sheer, god, awful pain.

They looked rocks train their palates.

They divorced their spouses to spend more time reviewing flash cards.

They had hired voice coaches and memory coaches.

They took dance classes to learn how to move more gracefully across the dining room floor.

Like me, bianca thought drinking wine was a pleasurable activity, something that helped her relax after a long, stressful day.

So she was surprised at how Somelias turn this activity into something approaching sheer, god awful pain.

The word share is used to emphasize the amount of something, or to mean nothing, but she thought the work of a somelier was nothing but pain.

They seemed to dedicate their life to wine.

One thing a Somalia does is train their palate.

This is their ability to distinguish and appreciate different tastes and identified types of good wine from their taste.

I guess this is quite important.

But divorcing their spouses does seem a bit extreme, I'm afraid.

I wouldn't take it so seriously.

I'll stick to drinking poorer quality, cheap red wine, sometimes called plank.

Well, our cheap wine doesn't always have to be poor quality.

Interestingly, there is some evidence that shows we only think wine tastes better because it's more expensive.

Ah, yes, This is research Hilga Plasman from Insyad Business School in France spoke about on the BBC World Services, why factor program she's been looking into what influence is consumer behavior.

The price tag affects that region in your brain that encodes your liking of the taste.

So in other words, you do not only think that you like the more expensive one more, you feel you like the more expensive one more.

Because your brain region that encodes this feeling is influenced by the price text.

So our brain is possibly playing tricks on us when we see the price tag on a bottle of wine, our brain encodes the information and tells us how it should taste in codes.

Means changes the information into something that we can use or understand.

Drinking more expensive wine makes you think it tastes better.

So perhaps when buying a supermarket wine or wine in a restaurant, it may be better telling yourself that the cheaper option is OK, I'll drink to that.

But I wonder how that most expensive bottle of wine ever sold auction tastes, the one dating back to 1774 you asked

me about MM. So you thought it sold for 20800.

But, sorry, rob, that's too cheap.

It was, in fact sold for 120800.

I've seen it wasn't drunk, I hope not.

Huh? Well, I think I'll stick to my plunk for now.

Sam

Plunk was one of our vocabulary words today, and describes cheap, poor quality wine.

We also mentioned a connoisseur, someone who enjoys a particular thing and knows a lot about it.

A somelier is someone who serves and gives advice about

wine in a restaurant. Share is a word used to emphasize the amount of something, or to mean nothing.

But palate describes someone's ability to distinguish and appreciate different tastes.

And finally, in codes, means changes information into something we can use or understand.

But now we're out of time.

So cheers everyone. Thanks for listening.

And goodbye. Goodbye.

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