Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [11]
Depending on the vineyard source and winery style, Syrah/Shiraz occasionally weighs in lighter than Merlot and Cabernet. As a rule, though, it is full-bodied and quite dark and purple when young. Look at the legs: even they are stained with color. The scent and flavor are big and saturated, too: red wine!
You have met the power elite of the wine world, the Big Six wine grapes, and I’d be willing to bet you found their quality and style differences impressive. You may have liked every one of them, or perhaps one stood head and shoulders above the rest. Whatever your feelings now, you’ll also find that the opinions you’ve developed about these grapes up to now will change over time. This is as normal as it is for your food preferences to evolve over time. When I was a kid, I hated mushrooms and olives; now I couldn’t live without them.
Aside from knowing your favorites, the greatest thing about knowing the Big Six is that when you shop for wine or look at a wine list, you now know their body styles as well as the main flavor differences. That is buying power.
Practice, Practice!
Feel free to repeat the Big Six tasting as often as you like. It’s a lot of fun, and you’ll always learn something new. I do this tasting for my waiters several times a year, and even the most wine-savvy among them always come back for a brush-up. Every professional knows that the best way to learn a lot about wine is also the most pleasant: Taste everything you can get your hands on.
CHAPTER TWO
“What Does It Taste Like?”
Putting Flavors into Words
For many people, wine lingo might as well be a foreign language. Confusion with the language on French and Italian wine labels is understandable, but my wine students tell me they often have just as much trouble with a lot of the wine words in English. You have amassed a lifetime of experience tasting and describing foods, so saying “It’s cheesy” or “It’s hot and spicy” mean something. But most of us didn’t grow up in a wine-drinking household, so we’re not used to saying “It’s oaky” or “It’s tannic,” and a little catch-up is in order.
Stocking the Wine Buyer’s Toolbox: The Power Tools of Wine
I have a quick solution to the label problem, and you have probably already guessed it—a corkscrew. We have tasted and learned about the body styles of wine—light, medium, and full. With the tasting lessons in this chapter, I will show you how to get a grip on the other really useful wine words in the Wine Buyer’s Toolbox. These big wine adjectives, used over and over again regardless of which region the wine comes from, or the grape used to make it, are dry, crisp, oaky, and tannic. We will explore each through tasting, but here is a short introduction.
Dry
In the everyday world of wine drinkers, “dry” is truly misunderstood, and it’s a wine word that I find very frustrating. I still have vivid flashbacks to those nights working the floor at Windows on the World selling wine. I’d be cruising through the dining room, pulling corks, making recommendations, pointing out the Brooklyn Bridge from our quarter-mile-high perch, and then it would happen. An eager guest pondering the possibilities among Chardonnays, Merlots, Cabernets, Chiantis, and all the rest would ask, “Which one is the driest?” The customer would look up at me from the wine list innocently, expectantly, an unwitting conspirator in that dastardly mind game Stump the Sommelier. And I would have to answer, “They are all dry.”
Since the word is going to come up again and again as we explore the world of wine, it’s best to define it and include it in the Wine Buyer’s Toolbox. I have to admit at this point that we in