Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [14]
Still, “dry” is a necessary descriptor for nonsweet wines. As your tasting experience builds, you will expand your vocabulary and your comfort zone using this and other wine words will broaden.
THE PALATE
In wine terms, this is just a fancy word for “sense of taste,” but with the emphasis on sense, not taste. Remember what you discovered in Chapter 1 about tasting—the tongue and its tastes (sweet, salt, sour, bitter) are team players in a bigger sensory effort. As you now know, “tasting” a mouthful of wine is really sensing it through smell and taste, plus sight and touch.
Crisp
The French often translate this wine adjective as “crispy.” To Americans, it suggests “crunchy,” which sounds like something that doesn’t belong in a wineglass. But crisp is the most popular English word to describe the tingle, tang, tartness, zing, and liveliness of acidity in wine. And it is a very good thing when it is in balance with the wine’s other components. This tasting will teach your palate what that means. You will find “crisp” to be quite useful, because many back-label descriptions on wine bottles use this word. And in Chapter 4, I will show you how to tell which wines will have especially crisp, vibrant acidity even when the back label doesn’t specifically mention it.
Like any other fruit, wine grapes, and the wines made from them, count acidity as one of their natural components. The degree to which the acidity can be tasted in the wine depends mainly on two things:
1. The grape. Different grape types have different levels of acidity, just as other fruits do (a lemon versus a peach, for example). The general rule of thumb is that white grapes and white wines tend to have higher acidity than red grapes and red wines. And usually, the Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc grapes have higher acidity than the Chardonnay grape.
2. The wine’s region of origin (where the grapes are grown). If the wine’s region of origin is cool (farther from the equator), then the wine is likely to have more prominent acidity. This is because as grapes ripen in the sunshine and heat, their sugar level rises and their acidity level goes down. Think of a not-yet-ripe green tomato (sour) versus a vine-ripe, red tomato (juicy and sweet). In cooler growing areas, the acidity in the grapes remains higher. Whatever the acidity level of the grapes, low or high, it will be reflected in the wine (more on this in Chapter 4).
And what is the taste difference between low and high acidity in wines? The simple, intuitive answer is that more acidity tastes tangier or, in wine lingo, crisper. Even though acidity is a taste perceived by the tongue, in many wines you will also notice a texture difference, and a different feeling in your mouth, between low-acid wines and high-acid, “crisp” wines (the wine word we are talking about, crisp, actually implies texture). Here is my description of the difference, which you’ll want to refer to as you do the tasting below. You’ll see that the contrast between high and low acidity is very distinct.
Low acidity: soft, plump, and smooth-feeling in the mouth
High acidity or “crisp”: like an electrical charge going through your mouth—tangy, tingly, mouthwatering.
High acidity is similar to the pucker you get from a squeeze of lemon, but less tart than citrus fruit because the wine’s other components add balance to this taste.
I AM AN ACID FREAK
I love the crisp, tangy, vibrant, mouthwatering quality of acidity in wines. Wine is beautiful. It smells great, tastes great, feels great. But if I have to choose the best of its virtues, for me it would be the acidity, hands down. That’s because in addition to loving wine, I love to eat, and the acidity in wine is what makes it taste so great with food.
Oaky
Up until a few years ago, I did not teach about the term oaky, because I thought students would find it too obscure and confusing. But now I