Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [13]
But “fruity” can also mean “ripe-tasting,” “soft,” or “approachable.” Over the last decade, Americans have developed a renewed interest in wine-drinking and in discovering new wine regions and styles. But since the typical time-starved millennium wine drinker can’t be bothered with cellaring wine or studying it, their taste is for here-and-now, easy-drinking, accessible wine styles. “Fruity” has become a catch-all term for these. But all quality wines have the taste of fruit. If not, what’s the point? You might as well drink soda or beer. Since wine is made from grapes, the fruit character of those grapes is certainly something every skilled winemaker hopes to showcase in the finished product. What throws people off is how much this fruit character can vary from wine to wine, although I am not sure why this seems so strange. Different wine grapes, like other fruits, offer a range of flavors. I tell my waiters and customers to think of the fruit flavors as a spectrum, ranging from lean to luscious. Once you think about the actual flavors of different fruits, it is easy to arrange them across this spectrum. For now, let’s look at familiar fruits:
The flavors of different wine grapes and styles can also be arranged across this lean-to-luscious fruit spectrum. I will show you how to do this in Chapter 4, and also how to predict the fruit character of a wine from its label, even when you do not know which grape was used to make it. For now, just keep in mind that you cannot predict exactly what you will get when requesting a “fruity” wine, because the definition varies from person to person. That is why “fruity” is not a part of the Wine Buyer’s Toolbox.
2. What the winemaker does during fermentation. The winemaker can control the amount of sugar and sweetness in a wine by stopping fermentation, either by lowering the temperature or adding alcohol. In the first case, the wine yeasts can’t ferment at very low temperatures, so some sugar remains. This method is often used in making wines with light to medium sweetness, like white Zinfandel or Asti Spumante from Italy. Adding alcohol (usually to above 15 percent by volume) kills the yeast, thus stopping the fermentation. In wines made with very ripe grapes, the high alcohol is natural, and occurs without additions. In the case of fortified wines, a famous category including Port and Madeira, the winemaker adds alcohol to stop the fermentation. (“Fortify” means to make stronger—you’ve seen “fortified with eight essential vitamins and minerals,” for example.) The additional alcohol stops the fermentation, leaving residual sugar, and sweetness, in the wine.
In my experience with waiters and consumers, even among the very wine-savvy, the idea that most quality wines are dry is a radical one. This is understandable, considering that chances are your first taste of wine was sweet, at least a little. For Baby Boomers, who currently comprise the biggest wine-buying segment of the population, their “starter” wines were the popular branded wines of the 1960s and 1970s—Blue Nun, Mateus, Riunite, and so on, which were all slightly sweet. Nowadays, white Zinfandel, with its slightly sweet style (although it is currently more fashionable to say “off-dry”), is very popular and one of the first wines many people sample. With these wines as your frame of reference, Is it dry? is a natural question when you are about to taste something new.
Another culprit in the confusion with “dry” is wine snobbery. Many so-called wine experts look on the popular categories of wine, such as white Zinfandel, with disdain, in part because of their sweetness. As if wine buyers weren’t already self-conscious enough! Now we have the wine world equivalent of “real men don’t eat quiche”: Real wine drinkers don’t drink sweet wines. That means for many buyers, “dry” says “I’m sophisticated about wine” whether they like the style or not. I