Do you ever get the feeling that wine critics are making up words or inventing fruit you’ve never heard of to describe wine?  This morning, I took a sidestep in my computer-generated wine reviews project.  Instead of generating whole reviews, I am now generating new words to describe wines.  Here is a list of words that the computer generated to describe O’Vineyards Trah Lah Lah 2008.  The hope is that they all sound vaguely real.

List of Computer Generated Wine Terms

• extremendously
• bracked
• erfect!
• O’wonder
• O’people
• disappeal
• commend
• Motherwise
• elsewhereas
• vraiments
• uncompliments
• cracket
• astounder
• disting
• uninspirits
• recomments
• curiositive
• tastinctive
• tremember
• rangerous
• astonight
• definish
• brilli
• nothink
• cours.
• massic
• changerous
• differench
• vinegativity
• extremember
• complemendously
• cherritory
• reminish
• measive
• gravinter
• recontaste
• Treal
• tong….
• complicious
• refunky
• greal
• perfectar
• Dangue
• mell
• superspecisitate
• charaction,
• afraisitate
• boood
• rephoune
• memememe
• whypecomplavound
• suppoottle

To spice things up, today I’m highlighting computer generated words rather than whole reviews. This means the n gram analysis focuses on letter pairs and letter triplets instead of word pairs and word triplets. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, refer to the simplified explanation in my first post about computer generated reviews.  Basically, the computer looks at what letters commonly appear together and it makes up words based on the statistical probability of random letters appearing near each other.

The list starts with words that strictly follow the analysis (high similarity to actual letter pairs in real reviews of Trah Lah Lah 2008) and it slowly descends into the bowels of vaguely human-sounding language (low similarity to actual letter pairs).  All capitalization and punctuation was generated by the algorithm.

Perhaps of special interest, the computer generated the word “commend” even though that never appeared in the reviews.  It also got a couple of real french words like “vraiment” and “cours”.

I definitely want to add some of these automatically generated words to my wine vocabulary.  I wonder how long it will be before somebody calls me out for using made-up words like vinegativity, mell and bood.

This wine is quite differench. Extremendously bracked attack. Midpalate is dominated by gravinter with some notes of refunky vinegativity. Mell with a measive finish that reminds me of cracket cherritory.