Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [28]
Although there are some red wines with floral characteristics, it is mostly a signature of certain white wine styles. Here is a tasting of a wine often celebrated for its signature floral character. The grape is the Muscat, a variety with ancient origins and widely grown throughout the world for both eating and winemaking. The Italian name is Moscato, and the wine we are going to taste is Moscato d’Asti (Moh-SCAH-toe DAH-stee), a lightly sparkling wine that is the sister wine to the popular Asti Spumante, both from the Piedmont region of Italy.
I have found that people love this wine style once they try it. It has a lovely light spritz, a touch of sweetness, light body, and, of course, that signature floral scent. It is also low in alcohol, making it a great brunch wine—it beats a mimosa any day. The name Moscato d’Asti follows a naming pattern common in many Italian wines: the grape, Moscato, attached to the town or region, Asti (more on this in Chapter 7).
Label Lingo: Style Words
As we have discovered, knowing the major wine words on a bottle label can help you know what you are buying. For the curious among you, here are the meanings of some other terms often found on wine labels—some of them informative, others just plain outlandish. Why do wineries put some of these more wine-geeky statements on their bottles? I think they’re just going a little overboard in their zeal, like passionate devotees of anything. Still, when they resort to wild lingo, they usually lose the rest of us along the way. In the wine world, I have spotted some over-the-top technical wine terms, such as “canopy management,” on the back labels of even bargain bottles. I call them Stupid Label Tricks because they tell the average buyer very little, if anything, about the style of the wine inside.
Words Related to Style
Bright This word usually comes with an attachment—bright fruit, or bright acidity. It means the fruit flavor or acidity grab your attention right at first sip, as one of the wine’s most prominent characteristics. Wines with this description can be especially refreshing.
Exotic Just as it applies to other things, this description suggests unusual and alluring characteristics in wine. It often refers to wines with a floral or spicy style, or with flavors beyond your typical fruit bowl, such as tropical fruits or rare berries. But with wine, the sky is really the limit.
Food friendly Food-friendly wines are especially good tablemates, with taste characteristics like spiciness and vibrant acidity that match well to a wide variety of foods, without overpowering or clashing.
Malo-lactic fermentation Yikes! Sounds scary. This is a second fermentation that winemakers use to soften the edgy taste of acidity in wine. It converts sharp-tasting malic acid into softer-tasting lactic acid, a contrast similar to the difference between a Granny Smith apple (tart) and a Golden Delicious apple (milder). It is routine in red winemaking—without it, many red wines would taste harsh. When white winemakers use malolactic fermentation, it gives the wine a softer style that is sometimes buttery.
Notes, hints, and tones These words are used when a wine displays “just a touch” of a particular scent or flavor, as in the “grassy notes” of some Sauvignon Blancs, “hints of buttery character” in certain Chardonnays, “vanilla tones” from oak aging, and so on.
Varietal character A wine with varietal character displays the typical scents, flavors, body, and style of the grape (varietal) used to make it.
Quality: Where It Comes From
Some of the most advanced label lingo is a group of words connected to quality, but before we can understand or use them, we need to examine what quality