Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [7]
In short, these grapes are to wine drinkers what “please” and “thank you” are to a toddler’s vocabulary. The sooner you get them down, the better off you will be for the rest of your wine-buying and-drinking life.
What If the Grape Name Is Not on the Label?
The Big Six have you covered there, too. One of the biggest things about the Big Six is that they really get around, turning up all over the world in some of the greatest, most famous nonvarietal wines. There are two main categories of these:
Regional wines These are named not for the grapes used to make them but for the region where the grapes are grown. These regional, or appellation, wines are most common in traditional European wine countries—France, Italy, and Spain. The idea is that regional factors like climate and soil are what make each wine’s style distinctive. Once you taste them, it is easy to see the logic, which applies to other products as well: Dijon mustard (named for its hometown in France), the famously sweet Maui onions from Hawaii, and the famous cheese from the French region of Roquefort, to name a few.
Brand-name wines These are simply made-up names or trademarked names, and they range from the most basic of wines to the very top of the quality chain. Most people have heard of at least a few of them—Manischewitz, Mateus, Blue Nun, Opus One, and Sassicaia are some examples.
Now look at the most famous of these categories, the regional wines—Champagne, Bordeaux, Chablis, and Burgundy—and the top brand-name wines—Opus One and Sassicaia, for example. All are based on the Big Six. Once you know the grape identity behind the famous names, you’ll have no problem deciding which to buy, because you will know the wine’s style based on your Big Six tasting.
Screw-Cap “Chablis” and Jug “Burgundy”
These may sound like famous regional wines, but they’re not. They are from the category of wines known as generics. Generic wines are usually jug or bulk wines packaged and sold under a classic European wine name, such as Rhine (from Germany) or Chablis and Burgundy (from France). Generics aren’t made in the named region, but they do trade on the region’s fame, making this category confusing for consumers. Many large American wineries use generic wine names. It’s a sore point with European wineries, which are not allowed to use generic names in order to protect the quality image of the real wines from those famous European regions.
Tasting the Big Six
Tasting the Big Six grapes has two purposes. First, you get to know what the wines made from these important grapes taste like. When you taste the Big Six grapes side by side, you will see they are quite distinctive from one another, just as a pear tastes different from an apple. While it is true that a varietal wine will vary from one region and winery to the next—wine would be quite boring otherwise—the signature character of the varietal is still there, in the same way that chicken is recognizable whether it’s the Kiev, chow mein, or barbecue version.
Second, you get to experience body, whether light, medium, or full. Body is the first, and most important, term in the Wine Buyer’s Toolbox and it’s interesting that this crucial wine-tasting term has nothing at all to do with taste. “Body” is a textural sensation, the feeling of weight, richness, and thickness in the mouth. As I tell the waiters I teach, this is one of the most important points about wine. In fact, I require new hires to understand body before their very first wine class on their very first day of training. And to help them grasp the