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Issue 159 - 11/15/04
WHAT WINE IS ALL ABOUT by Woody Woodworth of High Country Store What’s wine all about? Wine is about people. It’s made by people, for people and reflects the character and tastes of the people who enjoy drinking it. Not every person is alike and the wine we drink is equally as different. Compare it to several people listening to radio stations from around the world. Not every one is going to like the same music. The idea is to find a wine you enjoy and know you like the wine style and character. Then you can experiment occasionally with different types of wine to expand your tasting experiences. There really are no rules. If you enjoy the wine you select, then you have a “good bottle of wine”. The four basic flavors of wine are fruit, alcohol, acidity and sweetness. All wines taste of fruit, or should, but wine very seldom tastes of grapes. Some examples you might find in white wines are apricot, apples, strawberries, or pears. Blackberry, cherry and raspberries are commonly found in red wine. But remember, the flavors you recognize will probably differ from the person who is sharing the bottle with you. You can’t have wine without alcohol. Alcohol is the product of fermentation and is produced by the action of yeast on grape sugars. Alcohol helps to give wine the sensation of weight in the mouth and that sensation is known as body. It contributes to the feel and balance of the wine, helps it age gracefully and also has pleasant effects on the drinker (when used in moderation, of course). Acidity is what makes wine taste refreshing by balancing the fruit flavors and the weightiness of the alcohol. All wine must have acidity, both for it’s flavor and for it’s preservative qualities. Yeast normally gobbles up all of the sugar present in grape juice. When the alcohol level in the juice reaches a certain point, the yeast will die and the result is a dry wine. Sweet wines are sweet because they contain unfermented sugar from the grape juice. The balance between fruit, alcohol, acidity and sweetness (or dryness) is crucial to wine quality. Most wines produced today are to be consumed early, that is within the first few years after bottling. Home winemaking is becoming a popular method to producing fabulous wine at fractions of the cost of commercial wine. The winemaking process is simple, it requires little space and gives the consumer an opportunity to try a variety of wines for pennies a glass. If you buy wine to drink, get advice, buy wines that are within your budget and know you are drinking them and not storing them for years. For the brief time you have unopened bottles of wine in your household, store them in a cool place and lay them down. That will keep the cork moist and prevent oxygen from getting to the bottle and spoiling the wine. Issue 188 THE EYES HAVE IT The first step in your wine appreciation quest is visual. Fill the glass about one-third full, never more than half-full. Pick it up by the stem. Observe its color and appearance. No other liquid is as vivid and variegated, or reflects light with such joy and finesse. There’s good reason wine’s appearance is often compared to ruby and garnet, topaz and gold. The color you see can give you clues to help assess the wine’s age and body. Try to decide precisely which shade of red or white it is and whether it will stain the tablecloth permanently if you tilt the glass too far. Look at the wine in your tilted glass and just notice how dark or how pale it is and what color it is. Brighter more purple tones indicate younger red wines while a more brickish-red color indicates an older wine. Conversely, darker more golden whites usually indicate an older wine while a lighter more brilliant pale yellow indicates a younger white. Issue 189 SWIRL IT! Swirling the wine vaporizes it, and the thin sheet of liquid on the sides of the glass evaporates rapidly; the result is an intensification of the aromas. The easiest way to swirl is to rest the base of the glass on a table, hold the stem between thumb and forefinger, and gently rotate the wrist. Right handers will find a counterclockwise motion easiest, left handers the reverse. Move the glass until the wine is dancing, climbing nearly to the rim. Then stop. As the liquid settles back into the bottom of the glass, a transparent film will appear on the inside of the bowl, falling slowly and irregularly down the sides in the wine’s “tears” or “legs.” “Experts” derive meanings from them as various and profound as fortune-tellers do from looking at tea leaves, but in truth they’re simply an indication of the amount of alcohol in the wine: the more alcohol, the more tears. Remember that when you’re considering whether to open another bottle. Issue 190 WINES HAVE NOSES With poetic license typical of wine tasters, someone once dubbed the smell of wine its nose --- and the expression took hold. If someone says that a wine has a huge nose, he means that the wine has a very strong smell. If he says that he detects lemon in the nose or on the nose, he means that the wine smells like lemons. In fact, most wine tasters rarely use the word smell to describe how a wine smells because the word smell (like the word odor) seems pejorative. Wine tasters talk about the wine’s nose or aroma. Sometimes they use the word bouquet, although that word seems to be falling out of fashion. Issue 191 THE NOSE KNOWS To get the most out of your sniffing, swirl the wine in the glass first. But don’t even think about swirling your wine if your glass is more than half full (I hate it when they over pour in a restaurant!). As you swirl, the aromas in the wine vaporize, and you can smell them. Wine has some many aromatic compounds that whatever you find in the smell of a wine is probably not merely a figment of your imagination. WHAT'S THAT YOU SMELL? Keep your glass on the table and rotate it so that the wine swirls around inside the glass and air mixes with the wine. Then bring the glass to your nose quickly. Stick your nose as far as it will go into the airspace without actually touching the wine and smell the wine. Free-associate. Is the aroma fruity, woodsy, fresh, cooked, intense or light? Your nose tires quickly, but it recovers quickly, too. Wait just a moment and try again. Listen to your friends’ comments and try to find the same things they find in the smell. Issue 192 DON'T YOU DARE PUT THAT IN YOUR MOUTH! Often when a wine is seriously fl awed, it shows immediately in the nose of the wine. Wine professionals have a term for such wines. They call them DNPIM --- Do Not Put In Mouth. Not that you’ll get ill, but why subject your taste buds to the same abuse that your nose just took? Sometimes a bad cork is to blame, and sometimes it’s some other sort of problem in the winemaking or even the storage of the wine. TWO VERY COMPLICATED WINE TASTING RULES If you just drink wine, gulping it down the way you do a soda pop, you miss much of what you paid for. By tasting wine, you discover its nuances. In fact, the more slowly and attentively you taste wine, the more interesting it tastes. And with that, you have two of the fundamental rules of wine tasting: Slow down & pay attention! Issue 193 TASTING THE WINE Here’s how the procedure goes. Take a medium-sized sip of wine. Hold it in your mouth, purse your lips, and draw in some air across your tongue, over the wine. (Be utterly careful not to choke or dribble, or everyone will strongly suspect that you’re not a wine expert!) Then swish the wine around in your mouth as if you are chewing it. Then swallow it. The whole process should take several seconds, depending on how much you are concentrating on the wine. Issue 194 WINES HAVE PALATES TOO! Just as a wine taster may use the term nose for the smell of a wine, he may use the word palate in referring to the taste of the wine. A wine’s palate is the overall impression the wine gives in your mouth, or nay isolated aspect of the wine’s taste---as in “This wine has a harmonious palate,” or “The palate of this wine is a bit acidic.” When a wine taster says that he finds raspberries on the palate, he means that the wine tastes like raspberries to him. Issue 195 ROOTY TOOTY, SWEET OR FRUITY? Beginning wine tasters sometimes describe dry wines as sweet because they confuse fruitiness with sweetness. A wine is fruity when it has distinct aromas and flavors of fruit. You smell the fruitiness with your nose; in your mouth, you “smell” it through your retronasal passage. Sweetness, on the other hand, is perceived on the surface of your tongue. When in doubt, try holding your nose when you taste the wine; if the wine really is sweet, you’ll be able to taste the sweetness despite the fact that you can’t smell the fruitiness. Issue 196 TOUCHY FEELY Softness and firmness are actually textural impressions a wine gives you as you taste it. Just as your mouth feels temperature in a liquid, it feels texture. Some wines literally feel soft and smooth in your mouth, while others feel hard, rough, or coarse. In white wines, acid is usually responsible for impressions of hardness or fi rmness (or crispness); in red wines, tannin is usually responsible. Low levels of either substance can make a wine feel pleasantly soft, depending on the wine and your taste preferences. Alcohol and unfermented sugar also contribute to an impression of softness. Issue 197 IS IT ACID OR TANNIN? Red wines have acid as well as tannin, and distinguishing between the two as you taste a wine can be a real challenge. When you’re not sure whether it’s mainly tannin or acid you’re perceiving, pay attention to how your mouth feels after you swallow the wine. Both tannin and acid will make your mouth feel dry, but acid makes you salivate in response to the dry feeling. (Saliva is alkaline, so it neutralizes the acid.) Tannin just leaves your mouth dry. Issue 198 BALANCE IN ACTION For firsthand experience of how the principle of taste works, try this. Make a very strong cup of tea. When you sip it, the tea will taste bitter because it’s very tannic. Now add lemon juice; the tea will taste astringent (constricting and drying out your mouth) because the acid of the lemon juice and the tannin of the tea are accentuating each other. Now add lots of sugar to the tea. The sweetness should counter-balance the acid-tannin impact, and the tea will taste softer than it did before. Issue 201 WINE MAKING WONDER WORDS The vinification end of wine producing falls into two parts: fermentation, the period when the grape juice turns into wine, and maturation (or finishing), the period following fermentation when the wine settles down, loses its rough edges, goes to prep school, and gets to meet the world. Depending on the type of wine being made, the whole process can take three months or five years---or even longer if the bank isn’t breathing down the winery’s neck! Issue 202 ROLL OUT THE BARRELS The term barrel-fermented means that the unfermented juice went into barrels (almost always oak) and changed into wine there. The term barrel-aged usually means that the wine (already fermented) went into barrels and stayed there for a maturation period of a few months or a couple of years. Here’s why you may care whether a white wine is barrel-fermented or just barrel-aged. Wines that are fermented in barrels actually end up tasting less oaky than wines that were simply aged in barrels, even though they may have spent more time in oak. Lots of people get the effects of the two processes backward and may tell you that the barrel-fermented wine tastes oakier. Issue 203 A VARIETY OF VARIETIES Snowflakes and fingerprints aren’t the only examples of Nature’s infinite variety. Within the genus Vitis and the species vinifera, you find as many as 10,000 varieties of wine grapes. If wine from every one of these varieties were commercially available and you drank the wine of a different variety every single day, you would need more than 27 years to experience them all! All sorts of attributes distinguish one grape variety from the next. These attributes fall into two categories: personality traits and performance factors. Personality traits are the characteristics of the fruit itself---its fl avor, for example. Performance factors refer to how the grapevine grows, how its fruit ripens, and how quickly it can get from 0 to 60 miles per hour. |
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