James Silverton wrote:
> DaleW wrote on 18 Sep 2005 12:42:47 -0700:
> in the recipe they went for Bordeaux ('96
> D> Calon-Segur), I followed their lead and went with the 1999
> D> Leoville-Poyferre. Opened (a small glass poured, but not
> D> decanted) before the movie, it was smooth and ready by
> D> dinner time. Clean ripe dark berry/cassis fruit, there's a
> D> bit of chocolately new oak but even more Medoc earth.
> D> Graphite and smoke on the finish.
>
> Forgive me Dale but "graphite" is a new tasting term to me and, as a
> chemist, I did not know it had one :-) Can you describe the flavor
> another way, perhaps?

Yes, this has been troubling me, too. It's used to describe the smell
of pencil shavings, a smell that is ingrained in those of us of a
certain age from our school daze. Parker has used "graphite"
interchangably (IMO) with "pencil shavings," perhaps to sound more
erudite or probably because he gets bored writing the same descriptors
over and over and ... Anyone who's ever used graphite to lubricate a
lock will know that it doesn't have much of a smell and doesn't at all
resemble pencil shavings, which as you point out smell of the dried red
cedar wood traditionally used to make the pencils (at least in the US).
This gets into a different semantic trap, though, because "cedar" is
also used as a descriptor, but I've always assumed that that refers to
the live tree, which smells quite differently from a pencil. Hopelessly
confusing, I realize *sigh*

Mark Lipton

p.s. To add even more confusion to the fire, I only recently learned
that all the "cedars" native to the US (red, white, incense and Alaska)
are *not* true cedars (genus Cedrus) but actually members of the same
family as Cypresses. Go figger...