Good Grape Wine Company

September 19 2007

2007 Dictionary New Word Entry Nominee:  Spoofulate

You’ll be glad to know that new word additions to the 2006 edition of the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary include “agritourism,” “ringtone,” “supersize,” “drama queen.”

I have a suggestion for entry in 2007: Spoofulate and its plural form, Spoofulation.

I’ve seen this word a couple of times on Josh’s Pinotblogger site.  I fancy myself a man about town, in the know, hip with the current vernacular … except, in this instance, I had no idea what the heck “Spoofulate” meant.

Clearly, I can’t be the only one. 

If you do a Google search for “Spoofulate” you get a mere 256 search items from Google and searching for “Spoofulation” returns a scant 362 items-this is almost, positively obscure particularly when you consider that the word “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” returns 316,000 search items. And, well, the search term “Jeff Lefevere” returns 28,000 entries.  Clearly something is amiss …

I did some sleuthing on the word, and according to Joe Dressner, from his site, “The Wine Importer” the word can be attributed to Harmon Skurnik, a partner with his brother in Michael Skurnik Wines, a high-end importer and distributor of merit in New York.  The term was popularized, apparently, by Michael Wheeler ex-employee of Michael Skurnik Wines and a principal in Polaner Selections, another meritorious importer and distributor of wines in New York. 

Basically, Spoofulation means, according to Dressner:

Spoofulation is a form of manipulation which takes wine away from nature and into the technological world of fake extraction, fake aromatics, fake flavors, fake density, fake acidity, fake tannin levels, fake color and fake sugar levels.  Basically, fake wines.

The source of the phrase is traced back to 1990 Chateau Montelena winery in Napa and Harmon Skurnik’s interaction with a tasting room employee.  He explains in this excerpt:

The Year Was 1990 (give or take two years) - my wife Lori and I were traveling through Napa Valley and we stopped upon the tasting room of Chateau Montelena…as we tasted through their wines, the pretty young girl behind the counter explained to us how Montelena’s Chardonnay did not go through malolactic, and therefore retained some acidity and freshness, after which she uttered the famous words, “not like all those spoofulated Chardonnays being made in the Valley these days”.

I proceeded to ask her what she meant by “spoofulated” and she explained that she meant the new (at the time) style of Chard i.e. full malolactic, ultra rich, lees-stirred, golden, extracted, low acid Chards that were just starting to be produced by the likes of Helen Turley etc (and which Parker, incidentally, had yet to discover). She was passionately defending Montelena’s style of Chard, which was old fashioned (and frankly works quite well in the often torrid Napa
Valley)...

The word is broadened by Mike Wheeler when he says the word encompasses a much wider swath of wine to include:

These include: 200%+/- new oak, rottofermenters, micro ox, oak chips, de-acidifying, spin cone, reverse osmosis, adding nontraditional/not approved grapes to blends ... also spoofed wines are wines where enzymes/yeast/flavors are added to “create” a wine etc.

Spoofulation nowadays, I think, refers to a “New World” style of wine, high fruit, low acid and something that Parker might like hence Josh’s in-joke reference to the style as he tries to balance elegance and fruit in his own winemaking efforts.

If wine bloggers start using the word enough we might have enough influence to have it included in a future dictionary—right after “soul patch” and before “unibrow.”  But, you’ll have to excuse me now.  I need to do some more “Googling” on “Parker Points.”

For more reading on Dressner’s site please see these two links—the original post and a follow-up post. 

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