Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [24]
Tannic, Take Two
Tannin, to remind you, is a texture, giving a distinctive mouth feel as well as body to red wines. Wine pros refer to this combination of the body and tannin in a red wine as its “structure,” a term sometimes found in the descriptive notes on a back label. There are some other common label terms that refer to the tannin level in wines. Think back to your tasting of a lower-tannin Pinot Noir versus a higher-tannin Cabernet Sauvignon. Or better yet, repeat the tasting with the same or different wine selections for the fun and additional practice, and consider these descriptions as you compare the two wines.
Lower tannin: smooth, supple, soft, silky
Higher tannin: firm, structured, velvety, chewy
Expanding Your Vocabulary
It is now time for us to think outside the box—the Wine Buyer’s Toolbox, that is. We are going to explore some more exotic wine descriptions. As you will soon taste for yourself, these are the nuances that make wine wine, the synapse-revving subtleties and funky quirks that can make this glorious beverage seductive, sometimes breathtaking, occasionally even weird, and a lot more interesting than grapes could ever be. And what you will discover about wine as you explore is absolutely fascinating. In one little taste of wine, there is so much more to seduce your senses than you could ever hope to find in anything else you drink. And it’s all because of fermentation.
There’s no need to get deeply into the chemistry of it all. Learning fermentation science is the winemaker’s job. For the buyer, it’s sensory chemistry that matters. What is exciting to learn about fermentation is its powerful impact on pleasure. It is the reason wine is so much more exciting than grapes, and Scotch whisky is more fascinating than barley.
If you are skeptical, consider more familiar territory—cheese. “Milk is milk is milk,” a Napa Valley winemaker once said to me. “But think of the hundreds of great and very different cheeses that start out as the same bland beverage!” In both cheese and wine, we owe all those great scents and flavors to the fermentation process. In addition to converting the grapes’ sugar into alcohol, fermentation also produces traces of chemical compounds that mimic aromas and flavors in nature—from apples and cinnamon to rotten eggs and green pepper (most of the time the flavor compounds present in wine are good aromas and flavors, but not always).
I think this is one of the reasons wine-tasting descriptions, which can get downright funky, sometimes make people nervous—particularly the ones that make no reference at all to grapes. I always tell my students, “Grape juice tastes like grapes, but wine tastes like …” There are literally thousands of possibilities. And I have found that once wine drinkers learn that there is a bona fide reason for all the complexity in wine aromas and tastes, they suddenly become open to them, and to enjoying a new, higher pleasure quotient from each and every glass. That is exactly what we are looking for.
I have been “collecting” the different words on wine labels for a long time, so that each time I teach a wine class, I am (I hope) ready with answers to all the questions I’m asked. I could write a whole book on wine descriptors alone, but for now, I’ll cover the major ones as well as, for the trivia buffs among you, some of the more obscure ones. (I don’t advise flaunting the more exotic wine vocabulary at your next cocktail party. You’ll come off like a wine snob—and no one likes those.) Among all these, the terms that are used most often warrant a tasting lesson, so that you can experience firsthand what they mean. That’s where we’ll start.
WINE TASTING
Tasting for Butter
As this tasting will reveal, you don’t have to be an expert taster to note a pleasing buttery aroma