You’ve seen the lists. They pop up every year around this time. The lists of words folks have decided need to be banished due to overuse.

As vintners and their teams get ready to write new marketing materials and update their websites, I suggest consideration be given to making a list of their own. A list of the overused and abused words, phrases, and ideas in wine marketing.

As a wine collector I receive marketing communications from dozens of wineries, vintners, and their marketing teams. Combined with our club/allocation communications and all the wine-related posts I read on Facebook and Instagram (I’ve given up on Twitter) it’s easy for me to see patterns.

So here are my thoughts on what should be stricken from this year’s wine marketing materials:

Think audience: Far too often when reading about a wine offered for purchase I get the sense the descriptive materials are written for the critics, industry insiders, or cut-and-paste bloggers, not the wine drinking customer.

Kill the secret code: I trust it gets difficult to continually write about your wines when you’ve made and written about them for years, but please kill the code! I know of no industry that writes about their product with terminology their customers have to be told what their words actually mean. Plus I would much rather read your words about your wine than some critic’s who tasted it in barrel two years ago. Plus I cannot tell you how many articles I come across that are nothing more than glossaries explaining what ‘wine words’ actually mean.

Terroir: This was a cute, intriguing word the first of the 1,153,978 times I read it. I don’t read about a wine these days that isn’t ‘a reflection of its terroir’ or some similar wording. Truly a term that has become shopworn and blasé.

Humbled: Toss this one into the overused bin too, please. Who isn’t humbled these days? I’d much prefer to read that a vintner is proud, happy, pleased, or thrilled over some accolade or award their wine received.

Points: If you use a wine cellar software such as CellarTracker, you’ve probably become numb to a wine’s ‘points’. Every Tom, Dick, and Henrietta assign points now and they have become meaningless. Possibly a solid marketing ploy in the 1970s, but an outdated concept 40+ years later.

Rules: I came of age in the late ‘60s and early ’70s. Vietnam, Watergate, Summer of Love, Nixon, The Pentagon Papers, Rock and Roll, urban riots. The last thing I needed was some ‘adult’ telling me what rules I needed to believe to have their version of a good life. So trash the stupid ‘wine rules’. I have never had a barista tell me, when I tell them how I want my coffee made, that it doesn’t follow their rules. Likewise, our daughter enjoys cocktails and frequently asks the mixologist to change up some aspect of her drink’s recipe. She’s never been told it’s against the rules. I also doubt there is a rule about what munchie I have to pair with my cannabis. But I cannot count the number of times I have had a Sommelier tell me I should reconsider my wine choice at dinner or have someone tell me I shouldn’t be drinking a Cabernet with my sushi or pasta. No rules for coffee, cannabis and cocktails, but a boatload of them for wine? Pure lunacy!

Non-digestible words: I’ve made the decision to not buy far more wines based on tasting notes than the opposite. I view wine as a foodstuff, so I don’t want to drink something that is explained using inedible terms. I have no interest in offering a wine to my friends and family described with non-food terms such as rotting leaves, pencil shavings, acetate, mud, and other, even more bizarre, verbiage.

Get your green together: Organic, green, eco-friendly, sustainable, biodynamic, and on and on. These words compete with each other, confuse the customer, and as a result often get ignored. To make this worse, reading them as descriptors of a wine, but finding the vintner refusing to put any nutritional information on their label or in their accompanying information is disingenuous.

Avoid voids: Nature abhors a vacuum and so does social media. Just look at the anti-vaxxer movement. Mainstream healthcare thought it was something that would burn itself out so they ignored it. But this year the WHO named it as one of the top ten health threats worldwide. We are seeing this now in the wine industry. A few wineries are labeling their wines as clean, fit, etc. along with providing nutritional information, but 99% are not. This is not a good void! These days I never buy a packaged food without reading its nutritional information. Plus I find myself all too often having the argument with someone who tells me the only good wine is the one with the nutritional label because the others must be adding unhealthy, mystery ingredients to their wine.

Green and polystyrene rhyme, but don’t go together: I cannot tell you how many times I open a shipment of wine for our cellar, read the flyer explaining how green the winery is, but have to remove my wine from polystyrene packaging. In my state that cr*p goes into landfills and stays there forever! When this happens, which is far too often, it screams hypocrisy.

Proofread: Not much turns me off more than being told how wonderful a wine is and how I should rush to buy it, but be told this with mistakes in the copy! If you don’t care enough to proofread your materials I’m not going to be inclined to believe you use all the care necessary when tending your grapes or making your wines.

Last but not least skip the implied threats: I realize vintners want to sell their wines and make the demand for them cult-like. But not every winery is immediately a Scarecrow. I’m shocked at how often the wine marketing communications I receive contain what I view as threats for what will happen to me if I don’t pony up and buy my entire allocation. If you want to totem your customers behind the scenes that’s fine, but you needn’t threaten me with it. Besides, threats won’t ever make me buy anybody’s wine.

Cheers to great wine copy!