Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [27]
WINE TASTING
Tasting for Floral
Let’s first clear up a misconception: Floral does not mean a wine that tastes like perfume (although it’s easy to understand how a label-reader could jump to that conclusion). But some wines have an intoxicating perfumelike aroma. Floral is yet another style description that applies chiefly to the wine’s scent, although the flavors are still of fruit.
The Nose Knows
The last chapter dealt with “Putting Flavors into Words,” yet as we continue exploring wine descriptions, we keep coming back to where we began: the nose—yours and, now, the wine’s. Wine professionals and bottle labels often refer to a wine’s scent as its “nose,” as in “a wine with a spicy nose.” Even when we looked at basics like the Big Six wine grapes, we found the scent most revealing of each grape’s character. As we look at the rest of the label, you’ll see that many of the major wine words and descriptions focus on scent. As we already learned, it all comes down to the amazing capabilities of the nose (yours) to discern the finest of distinctions and variations in all the scents nature has to offer. Smelling a floral wine is like smelling perfume. Your nose cannot necessarily isolate individual blossoms, but you get an overall impression of flowers.
Shalimar, Ornellaia, Chanel No. 5, Le Bouge, Obsession, Opus One—these are famous fragrances, and famous wines. Can you pick which is which? The similarities between fine fragrances and fine wines don’t stop with the luxurious names (and prices). Like wines, the scents of fragrances rely on a “layering” of often very exotic combinations of different aromas, which change and gain complexity when combined in an alcoholic base, which is also common to both.
There is, however, a very big difference. For perfumers, fragrant essences, either captured from nature or chemically derived, are the raw materials from which to craft alluring scents. Winemakers must coax their flavors and scents from the vineyard, and then the fermentation process. Mother Nature throws so many variables into the mix that most winemakers say they look at their life’s work as one big experiment, for which they get only one harvest per year to check their progress. Many tell me they owe their best results to a little bit of gut feel, a lot of luck, and, mostly, a great vineyard. It is no wonder the world’s most famous vineyards are considered hallowed ground. And in the case of fermentation, despite extensive ongoing research, relatively little is known about how its chemical reactions result in complex scents in wine, and thus very little is in the winemaker’s control. Bible readers might say it was meant to be that way: “[The Lord] brings forth food out of the earth; and wine that maketh glad the heart of man” (Psalms 104: 14–15).
If you are not a gardener of exotic flowers, a great way to familiarize yourself with these different scents is to head to the mall. Candle shops and stores specializing in fragrant cosmetics, such as The Body Shop or Caswell-Massey, often display extensive lines of products (candles, aromatherapy oils, etc.) that let you take in the individual scents of these flowers. I once worked with a perfumer to develop a tasting of wines whose scents mimicked the essences in a range of very famous perfumes.
Some of the most common floral scents associated with wine are orange blossom, honeysuckle, lilac, lavender, lily, hyacinth, jasmine, and hibiscus. In my experience, floral is one of the harder wine terms for tasters to relate to, probably because most of us come in contact with these exotic scents only rarely. Just keep an open mind as you continue experimenting,