Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [33]
Putting Fruit Flavor on the Map
Let me introduce you to what I call the Flavor Map, a guide to understanding the full range of fruit flavors found in all the quality wines produced in the world. About fifteen years ago I left a budding career in investment banking to pursue my passion—wine. In the field of wines, keeping abreast of the market means you taste hundreds of wines every week. I found that the best way to learn was to taste with people who were more experienced than I, and to listen to their descriptions. One day I listened to judges in a wine competition toss around dozens of different fruit and style descriptions—yet every wine they were tasting was made from the Chardonnay grape. I asked one of them, “Why so many different styles?” “Because the grapes are grown in drastically different climates,” she told me. “The taste in the bottle is a reflection of the amount of heat and sun in the growing region.”
That made a huge impression on me. And cleared up a lot of confusion. I had experienced the broad range of flavor possibilities in grapes like Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Merlot, and so on. But short of tasting and trying to memorize the style of every wine on the market (which I’ll tell you right now is impossible), I could think of no way to predict the style of any particular bottle. Now I had a starting point that made a lot of sense—climate warmth and sunshine. Pineapples require lots of sun to grow and, as you will discover with our tastings, so do exotic, tropical fruit-flavored wines. That is how the Flavor Map was born.
Apples, mangos, cherries, figs, raisins … wines are capable of just about every fruit flavor at the farmer’s market, and you know it’s not just because of climate. As we have already discussed, part of the answer is fermentation, which is what makes wine taste like wine. Once the yeasts get hold of grape juice, what started out as a pleasantly sweet liquid can be transformed into a drink of incredible complexity, with tastes and aromas not just of grapes but of other fruits as well. And alcohol, the other major by-product of fermentation, amplifies those flavors and scents, just as it intensifies the scents in perfumes and the flavored extracts used in baking.
You also know for the most part which wines will have which specific flavors. From our tasting comparisons, you are quite familiar with one of the factors that influences a wine’s fruit style, namely, the grapes used. Certain grapes are associated with a unique style “signature,” such as grassy and herbaceous notes in Sauvignon Blanc, floral flavors in Muscat, and the spice of Gewürztraminer. And as we discovered in Chapter 1, all of the major wine grapes have distinct fruit-flavor profiles. For example, the aroma and taste of the Riesling grape are different from that of Chardonnay. Our tastings in this chapter will let us explore and define more precisely the fruit character of each of those grapes, and our use of the Flavor Map is going to make sure you remember them without having to do any memorization.
Why Do You Need a Flavor Map?
The fact that all the major wine grapes have distinctive flavor styles does not mean that all wines made from them are the same. The excitement of wine is that each bottle of a type still has its own unique attributes, just as one thousand sunsets or a thousand beautiful brunettes can be spectacular, each in a different way. Many people find this diversity (you might call it unpredictability) to be one of the most intimidating aspects of wine.
But rise above the confusion and you will see that these variations really mean possibilities. Obviously, to comfortably explore and enjoy all of these possibilities, you need a simple and precise way to predict how the fruit flavors will differ between, say, two Chardonnays or between an Oregon Pinot Noir and a California bottling—before you buy them. New taste sensations