Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [22]
Body Style: What the Label Tells You
Outside of a restaurant, however, you’ll nearly always be making your decision based on reading wine labels. Let’s explore what the label has to offer (in addition to the usual suspects like grape variety) to help you predict the style of the wine inside.
As always, we start with body. It is really helpful to know the body style of a wine, because so often that influences your choice. In summer, with lighter fare and hot weather, you probably look for lighter-bodied wines. And how about with that big-ticket sirloin in a steakhouse? You probably won’t get the most enjoyment out of your meal drinking a delicate, light-bodied wine. By the same token, it’s obvious that you don’t want a monster red with your aunt Peggy’s salmon croquettes. And then there is also your personal preference to consider. I have one friend who only ever drinks big, bold Cabernet Sauvignons, regardless of the circumstances. It’s what he likes.
You know how to identify the body styles of the major grape varieties (the Big Six). But there is another very powerful tool on wine labels to help you predict the wine’s body style. It’s the Percent Alcohol by Volume. For this information, you can thank the U.S. government, which requires wineries to put the wine’s alcohol percentage on every bottle label.
Alcohol content is one of the more helpful tools to the buyer. Simply put, to the taster, alcohol is perceived as body in a wine. So when you taste two wines side by side, one with lower alcohol and one with higher, you will generally perceive the wine with the higher alcohol percentage as fuller-bodied. Judging a wine by alcohol content is especially useful when:
you’re considering wines with regional names, rather than a grape name whose body style you know;
you’re looking at wines made from grapes other than the Big Six (and you undoubtedly will, either on your own or after reading about them in later chapters of this book);
you’re trying to decide between two similar wines, such as two different Chardonnays, and need to determine how their styles compare.
The government gives wineries some leeway in labeling the alcohol percentage on their wines—they need only be accurate within 1.5 percent of the actual wine. For the consumer, this is mostly an issue on the high end of the Table Wine percentage range, where a wine’s actual alcohol content may be above that shown on the label. That is because a winery pushing the upper 14 percent limit would have the incentive to understate the alcohol in their wine, to avoid a higher tax. But even if the alcohol percentage of a wine labeled 14 percent is slightly underreported, you already know what to expect—full body.
To sum up, you can learn about a wine’s body style just by looking at the percent alcohol by volume listed on the label. Here is a summary of the range of alcohol percentages for table wines, and the body style to which they generally correspond:
Light body: 7–10.5 percent
Medium body: 10.5–12.5 percent
Full body: Above 12.5 percent
WINE TASTING
Tasting for Body, Part II
Let’s try it. I will give you two percentage alcohol/body comparisons—one with white wine and one with red. You can try the reds and whites separately, but I recommend that you eventually do both tastings. With either tasting, you can make an evening of it. Try the wines, then follow with dinner so you can see how each of them tastes with food.
White Wine
Our white wine tasting compares two Rieslings, one from Germany that is light in alcohol, and one from Alsace in France, where the Rieslings generally have higher alcohol. This is because the growing region is warmer and sunnier, and as we have learned, grapes get riper in sunnier regions, and riper grapes give more alcohol and thus fuller-bodied wines.
This is the third Riesling tasting we have done in this book and, if you are like most people, probably your third Riesling tasting ever.