I recently did a post that aimed to bust some wine myths. It was quite difficult to write actually – wine is an endless world of exceptions to rules and there is so much to discuss.
A few people came back and said they don’t actually know how to taste wine. How do they know which fruit flavours they should be getting? And what do those flavours mean? This post will aim to pull apart the structure of a wine and explain a little bit about what’s behind the flavours.
WARNING: this is quite a long post. Only read it if you actually want to know..!
Structure
You often hear people say things like ‘full bodied’, ‘well balanced’ or ‘well rounded’ when talking about a wine. These are generic (though useful) terms that are made up of lots of components:
- Sweetness: this ranges from dry (most wines) to luscious (incredibly sweet, like a PX Sherry). There are lots of levels in between and they are harder to pin point: a wine can be off dry, which would mean you get a little bit of sweetness at the tip of your tongue. Sweetness adds body to a wine.
- Acidity: high acid is generally a good thing. It gives a wine the ability to age well and it keeps it refreshing. Acidity takes away body from a wine and is often used to balance against sweetness. The way to measure acidity is to take a sip, swallow/spit and then open your mouth and look down. If you dribble everywhere then acidity is high.
- Alcohol: due to wine making this can have quite a direct correlation with sweetness. Sugar gets turned into alcohol so, unless they’re adding sugar after fermentation, the higher the alcohol the lower the sugar. However, alcohol can taste a bit sweet sometimes – you should look for warmth on the back of the throat for alcohol. Alcohol adds body to a wine and also needs to be balanced with acidity.
- Tannin: these are the things that coat your mouth. Tannin comes from the grape skins and stalks. You don’t get tannin in white wines and usually not in rosé. Tannins can be low to high. The rule of thumb is: if you find them on your tongue, cheeks and teeth then they are high, if tongue and cheeks then medium, if just tongue then low. Tannins also have different natures: silky/smooth/chalky/sticky/ripe – the list goes on. This is something you will just have to pick up by tasting loads and loads of wine. Silky, ripe tannins that are high might taste low. Chalky, unripe tannins that are low might taste high because they stick out more. You’ll need to master that. Tannins add body to a wine.
- Intensity: this is intensity of the nose (smell) and palate (taste). Basically, how big are the flavours? Intensity is good, we want intensity (so long as it is in balance with everything else). There are two ways to think of this: one is if you can start listing lots of different smells and flavours straight off without thinking about it then it is pronounced intensity. The other is if it were a piece of music would it be loud? For example, a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc might not have loads of different flavours but the flavours it does have smack you in the nose immediately like a fan fair smacks you in the ears.
So there you have the main components that make up the structure of a wine. Now obviously in a restaurant you’re not going to sit there with your mouth open waiting to see if you dribble. Essentially, a really damn good wine won’t make you notice any one of these elements particularly more than the other – ie it will be well balanced. It might bring words to mind like smooth, well-rounded. Or sometimes you hear a wine being called ‘flabby’ or ‘oily’ which means it is lacking acidity, or ‘simple’ would mean it is lacking some intensity/complexity.
Now when adjectives spring to mind you can think about why those particular words are coming to you and what they mean.
Flavours and what they mean
So in terms of picking out flavours , I’m afraid the bad news is that it comes with practise. It’s a case of fine tuning your nose and palate. However, it helps to have an idea of the sort of words you should be looking for. I will give you some examples of notes and flavours and what they mean.
When you study wine, flavours are split into primary, secondary and tertiary (though admittedly nobody really uses these terms in day to day life). I will use this structure as it’s a really easy way of breaking them down.
Primary Flavours: FRUIT (and stuff)
Primary flavours come from the grapes and the vineyard. Have you heard the word ‘terroir’ before? This is where it comes in. The terroir includes climate, soil and topography – so basically the environment in which the grapes are growing – and has a direct effect on what the wine tastes like.
Some grapes might have distinctive flavours that are always present no matter where they are grown: Merlot tends to always have a mix of red and black forest fruits, Gewurztraminer tends to always taste of lychee, Cabernet Franc seems to always have a sort of underlying green or herbal element. However, these can be affected by where they are grown.
In red wine, it doesn’t massively change which fruits you can taste but it can change what type: ie in a cool climate the fruits are probably fresh, maybe even underripe or ‘crunchy’. So say a Merlot tastes of red cherry, in a cool climate this might be a sour cherry. In a warmer climate where the grapes have seen more sunlight you might get a ‘confected’ cherry, baked cherry or red cherry jam. (Note – these might be sweet flavours but it doesn’t add sweetness to a wine. It is important to differentiate between actual sugar and sweet flavours.)
This is also the case in white wine but the fruits change too. In a cool climate white wine you might expect to taste citrus fruits and green flavours: lemon, lime, grapefruit, grass, gooseberry, herbs. In a slightly warmer climate the fruit starts to become stone fruit: peach, apricot, nectarine. Then an even warmer climate the fruit becomes tropical: mango, banana, pineapple. Chardonnay is brilliant example of this, even in one region like Burgundy a Chablis from the north tastes of green apple, lime, lemon etc. Then a Macon from the south has more stone fruits and even some hints of tropical fruits in warm years.
It’s not just the region that the grapes are from but the site they’ve been planted on: a site that gets lots of sun will have more ripe flavours than a site with less sun.
So what about the ‘and stuff’? Herbs, spices and minerals. For example, a lot of Australian wines have a herbal, almost minty, flavour. This is actually eucalyptus that is infused through the ground – it is especially prominent from sites next to eucalyptus forests. Another ‘other’ is wet stones or minerality. This tends to come from the soil – such as in the Loire’s Pouilly Fumé: the soil gives the wines a sort of smoked (fumé) and wet stone element. Shiraz (or Syrah) can quite often have a black pepper note to it and Cabernet Sauvignon can have a green pepper (capsicum) flavour.
Secondary flavours: lees and oak (and stuff)
Secondary flavours come from the winemaking process. I won’t go through all the elements of winemaking that happen in the winery because they’re relatively endless. There are a few main ones that impart a select group of flavours.
- Malolactic Fermentation (MLF): this makes a white wine taste creamy and softens the perceived acidity. It is the process where malic acid (which is sharp and tart) gets converted into lactic acid (which is found in dairy products). This is a natural occurrence so if the winemaker does not want this to happen they have to actively block it. There are a lot of white wines that you wouldn’t expect to undergo MLF: a fresh Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling, Pinot Grigio – basically any aromatic white wines where you don’t want the primary flavours or acidity to be dulled. Chardonnay and Chenin Blanc most commonly undergo MLF (and most red wines do too but you don’t tend to notice it).
- Battonage: also called ‘lees stirring’ but battonage sounds more fancy. Lees are bits of yeast residue and bits of the grapes left over after fermentation. On a fresh white wine these would be taken away immediately but leaving them encourages MLF and also imparts extra flavours. The lees sink to the bottom so stirring them makes sure you get as much influence as possible from them. These flavours can be: bread, dough, brioche, buttermilk, butter, cream – sometimes they are even a bit nutty.
- Oak: oh the world of oak is very complicated but I’ll keep it simple. Firstly it is important to note that oak doesn’t always give flavour: if it is very old oak and very large barrels they will be what we call ‘inert’. However, oak can also give loads and loads of delicious (or sometimes overpowering) flavours. It can be used on red or white wines. Flavours that would come from oak are sweet spices (such as vanilla, nutmeg and cinnamon), cedar, toast, burnt toast, smoke, coconut, chocolate, caramel and the list goes on.
Oak doesn’t always come from barrels – some producers use oak chips which are dunked into the wine like a tea bag or just float in the wine itself. This can work well but sometimes can make the oak a bit jarring – it sort of sticks out and you feel like you taste it separately to the rest of the wine.
The newer the oak, the stronger the oak flavours. For a while Australia used too much new oak on their Chardonnays and this is why Chardonnay got its bad reputation. This practice has been largely cleaned up but the wine trade is still desperately trying to convince drinkers of a certain age that they don’t need to avoid Chardonnay any more.
Tertiary Flavours: (the ridiculous flavours that make the world of wine look mental)
Right, this is the bit where people start to list things like ‘my granny’s wardrobe’, ‘the bark of a tree I saw in Scotland once’ etc etc. What’s really going on here?
Tertiary flavours come from bottle ageing. Not all wines are meant to develop tertiary flavours and so sometimes they can be negative. On a lovely wine that was meant to age in the cellar though, it opens up a gorgeous world of flavours. Generally, the more developed the tertiary flavours are, the less prominent the primary flavours are. People like their wines at different stages – some people like it all smoke, leather, mushroom and tobacco and don’t care for the fruit flavours. Others prefer to keep some of the fruit there – nobody is right or wrong though it is very interesting to see how one wine develops over time.
So, here’s a list of some of the flavours you would get from bottle ageing: mushroom, wet forest floor, leather, bacon, smoke, tobacco, cigar box, honey, caramel nuts… and sometimes the primary fruit flavours become tertiary by becoming dried fruits: raisin, prune, dried apricot, dried fig etc.
So, as you can see by the ridiculous length of this blog entry, tasting wine can be really, really complex. The good news though is that the only way to get better is by tasting loads and loads of wines. When you taste them, think about where they come from and why they taste how they do. Happy tasting!