Recently I was part of a very interesting learning exercise. A bit ironic to have to mentioned that, for when one works with wine, every bottle opened, every glass swirled, and every sip savoured, conceals some learning or another. Ideally. Very often, we tasters fall into a rut and distill our findings down to some pretty rudimentary stuff?does it taste flavourful enough, is it balanced, what?s the price and is it worth it, does it have some time before it spoils?and given the ticks in the right boxes, we are happy to order a glass, or recommend the bottle.
It is not too often that we can detach ourselves from the commercial cycle of wine as a product to plug into wine as a metaphoric message in a bottle.
To tackle this un-problem (for it isn?t a problem in the true sense), allow me to briefly define what a wine should do. It should please. Offer satisfaction, at all levels. And then, for some, it should carry a signature, a time-honoured stamp that demarcates it as being from a particular region, grape, or style. If a wine can achieve all that, and yet not cost as much as a private space mission, then, one has little reason to discard it entirely.
Recently, in the company of very learned wine-folk, I was reminded and consequently, re-introduced to this side of tasting wines: unravelling the signature of a wine in order to see just how true-to-character it is and just how much one can tell about it, purely by virtue of being guided by one?s senses. The basic elements that contribute to the health or make-up of a wine are sun, soil,and water. The deficiency or surplus of either or all of these can create a different taste and flavour profile in each case. Some places may have it better than others ? a concept that the French like to showcase as Terroir ? but it doesn?t mean that good wines can only come from the best soils. Apart from the sense of a place, the winemaker?s style and approach also hold considerable sway over the final product.
So as one can tell, many things about a wine are pretty fixed and once one learns to tell them well, one can work the way back to gauge where the wine could hail from and what significant characteristics mark out this typicity. Here are a few things you would like to keep in mind when tasting a wine:
– Just because a wine tastes sweet doesn?t mean it has sugar. Often, our senses make us believe so simply because the fruit component in the wine is extremely ripe i.e. the aromas are so overwhelmingly fresh and juicy that our mind leads us into imagining that what we are sipping has to be sweet. Such wines can usually belong to a region where the ripeness is not a maturity, hinting therefore that it is an area where the sun is aplenty, thereby ensuring a good ripening period before harvest.
– A wine that has high alcohol, and especially a bit off balance, will always seem to weigh heavy on the finish, tending to create a warming sensation as it slides down our gullets. This is a sign of a wine that could possibly come from a warm climate.
– A wine that is very crisp, almost nearing the point of being sour, is high in acidity. You will know because it will make your mouth water profusely. This salivation is a sign of the high acid component in the wine that our mouth is trying to counter-balance. Such wines are usually from cold climates as in such areas, the feeble sun allows the wine acidity to remain high. Often, such wines may not exhibit a wide range of aromas and may tend to lean towards simple white fruit notes.
– A wine with amplified notes of nuts or smoke, or coconut and vanilla, hint at the use of oak in one form or another. This is a common practice in many parts of the world but the former aromas are more associated with French oak whereas the latter are more synonymous with American oak. In either case, use of obvious oak are signs of expensive winemaking techniques, one that are only usually applied if the wine is rich enough to sustain this oak and stands to gain from it. If you smell oak, think money spent by the winemaker. Whether you like it or not, or whether it imparts anything special to the wine (or simply distracts from it) is a different question, one pertaining to personal choice.
– Lastly, a wine with detectable sweetness, one that if rubbed between your fingers makes them sticky, is what we call an off-dry (or, if the sugar is more, sweet) wine. This sugar is not added unnaturally but is the sugar from the grape that is intentionally preserved. Such wines are not to be considered any less important than dry wines. Sugar doesn?t make a wine frivolous.
These five pointers are the very basic of steps in detecting things in a wine that help us assess it for quality and acceptability. They may be more technical than the waxy poetic notes that you may have often read on the back labels of a wine, but these are the tools with which the wine trade works, the implements of a sommelier, if you may. And if you feel that all that prose only gets in the way of true natural enjoyment, then definitely apply all these measures the next time you sip a wine, and try to see what it is telling you ? nothing better than getting it straight from the source.
The writer is a sommelier