Unfined *

A wine that has not been subjected to clarification by the addition of fining materials (e.g. egg whites, gelatine, diatomaceous earth, dry clay powder, and many others).  

Nobody likes cloudy wine, so winemakers sometimes go to great lengths to make their wine crystal clear. During the last stages of production, a wine will “fall bright”, when the majority of grape matter and dead yeast cells drop to the bottom of the tank or barrel. For some wines, this is sufficient to make a crystal clear wine, ready for bottling; others need some help. There are also times when a little problem arises that must be taken care of. Fining is a very old technique that helps rid wine of various unwanted conditions, whether visible, olfactory or tasteable.

Fining materials do their work by attaching to unwanted matter and forcing it to drop out of the wine. The fining materials themselves do not remain in the wine but join the sludge left behind. Fining can be light or aggressive, depending on the material used and the result the winemaker is looking for. A light fining, perhaps with beaten egg whites, is rather standard with red wines. At the other extreme is a wine that went in the wrong direction and then requires a great deal of intervention to salvage it, and there is a long list of options. In either case, fining removes something from the wine, and there are those who believe the wine is the lesser for it -- that fining removes character as easily as it removes other things.

A wine that is unfined has had no extra elements introduced to it. This is reassuring to the vegetarian or vegan who doesn’t want a wine that has had egg, milk, blood, bone, or gelatine in it. Unfined also means that the wine was at its peak without this intervention. The final bonus is that an unfined wine has all the goodness it was born to have – nothing has been removed through fining – and in that case, you are likely to see the word “Unfined” proudly displayed on the bottle label.
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Table Wine

1. Wine with no geographic designation, often considered to be the lowest quality available. (Fr: vin du table, It: vino da tavola); 2. An exceptional wine that does not conform to local wine regulations (e.g.“Super Tuscans”); 3. A non-fortified wine *

If it’s not sparkling or syrupy sweet or fortified, then it’s a table wine, according to most wine jurisdictions. In countries that have no appellation systems - the laws that govern the use of place names and set standards for growing and making wine - table wine is a broad category that includes just about everything (with the above noted exceptions). In more formal regions, France being perhaps the best example, a basic table wine is the entry point for decent wine (below that we find ‘vin ordinaire’). These can incorporate any sort of blend and can include bulk wine from other countries. In to order proclaim that a wine is a better quality, it would come entirely from a designated region using approved grapes and vinification techniques. In France, that includes vin de pays (‘wine of the country’), appellation controllée wines, cru and village wines, and the now somewhat rare VDQS. Now, all of these are technically table wines, but they’ve been lifted above the mare table wine category by reason of their pedigree.

Now, there are those who believe the local rules, while fundamentally well intentioned, are too limiting. Chianti, for example, is a great wine in all its incarnations. But the classic chianti formula calls for five different grapes. The dominant grape is sangiovese, which is a star in its own right. But the traditional chianti formula required a minimum of 15% other grapes, including, at one time, white grapes that contribute little to the mix. One could quietly forget to add the less desirable grapes, but that would invite scandal if discovered. And what if you have a goal that the local laws do not permit? Cabernet is a great grape to add to sangiovese. But if a chianti producer adds cabernet, then the wine can be disqualified as chianti. In that case, the wine would be demoted to mere table wine. For the producer, it’s a gamble and quite a big one. Chianti is a very marketable name, and having that word on the label, along with its guarantee of authenticity, is pretty helpful. But a wine that has flouted both laws and traditions must go it alone.

On the other hand, a wine trades on its uniqueness and demonstrated quality can’t be a bad thing.
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* from The Frugal Oenophile's Lexicon of Wine Tasting Terms

Skin Contact

Time that grape must spends on skins and solids during maceration. For red wines, ranges from several days to several weeks. Rosé wines spend a day or two on the skins. White wines do not normally spend time on the skins, although some winemakers will allow limited skin contact. *

To produce wine is a fairly simple thing:  toss together some fruit juice and some yeast and wait. Grapes are a very good way to start because their juice contains all the right ingredients, and their skins even have a layer of ready-to-use yeast. OK, that gets us wine, but how do you create a quality wine, a distinctive wine, a wine for the ages?

A cluster of grapes consists of stems, pulp, juice, skins, and seeds. White wines are made from just the juice. But red wines need more stuff than pulp and juice alone can deliver. Red wines need, first of all, colour, and that comes from the skins. Red wines also need tannin, and that too comes from the skins (some tannin also comes from the stems and seeds). So, to make a suitable red wine, we need to leave the juice  –  the must  –  in contact with the skins. And since nothing is simple when it comes to wine (itself a simple beverage) the decisions surrounding skin contact are many.

A white wine may have some skin contact, usually measured in hours. This can give the wine a subtle boost in terms of colour and aromatics. Too much skin contact, though, can extract skin tannin and that’s something we don’t want in a white wine, so the winemaker will press the juice immediately or after brief skin contact.

Red wines can macerate in contact with the skins for hours, days and even weeks, depending on the goals of the winemaker. One way to produce rosé wines, for example, is to allow a day or so of skin contact. Sometimes enough colour can be extracted simply by pressing the grapes very slowly for hours of controlled skin contact  for a wee bit  of colour and not much tannin.

Now let’s follow a batch of red wine. When we say skins we’re also talking about stems and seeds … it’s a package deal. We can use a mechanical destemmer to remove as much wood as possible, but most winemakers will leave in some of the stems. Stem tannin can improve a wine’s structure, and will also enhance its ageing ability. Seeds will quickly drop to the bottom of the fermentation tank where they don’t have much effect. The rest of the mass – the skin, stems and remaining pulp – has to be controlled.  Fermentation produces a lot of carbon dioxide that rises to the surface, carrying the mass of stems and skins – the ‘cap’ – with it. To keep the wine in contact with the skins, and to prevent decay setting in, the cap must be pushed back down, up to several times a day.

The winemaker will assess the wine’s progress daily, and eventually gives the order to ‘rack’ the wine off of the skins. That order can come after a few days, when a lighter, less tannic wine is the objective, or maceration can continue. After about 10 days, most of the goodness has been extracted, and this is when most wines will be racked. Some winemakers will allow the process to continue well past that mark. Wine can stay on the skins for as long as a month. An interesting thing happens in that case. Instead of extracting more and more tannin from the skins and stems, the tannins can, in fact, soften. But this is ‘white knuckle’ winemaking, and is usually attempted only by the most intrepid winemakers.
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Reserve *

An unregulated New World term that suggests a higher quality wine that has been “reserved” from the rest of that year’s harvest, but can just as easily be meaningless.

Not much in the way of Q words to choose from, so let’s move right to the R's. The notion of a ‘reserve’ wine is that it has been set aside as being the best of that year’s batch. Occasionally the reserve wine is created by design, with the winemaker taking extra care every step of the way on that wine, whereas the remainder of the lot is handled in a more everyday fashion.

After the wine has aged in barrels for the allotted time, it will all be blended together in one large vat to create the cuvée. While in the course of sampling the barrels, the winemaker will also be looking for exceptional barrels. These would then be set aside to go into the reserve wine. In Old World wine regions, the practice is common-place, and the terms Reserve, Reserva, and Riserva are all regulated. You cannot use these terms on the labels if your wines don’t make the grade. Nor can you call ALL your wine reserve. It must have been reserved from something.

Not so in the New World. Most of these wine regions have yet to put in place any kind of appellation systems, let alone quality tiers. With little in the way of labelling regulations, anyone can put practically anything on a wine bottle. It’s not unusual to see bottles labelled “barrel reserve” or “cellar reserve” that have seen neither a barrel nor an actual cellar. There are even wineries that label all of their wines as reserve. Makes you wonder what the non-reserve stuff must have been like.
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The bug that ate its way through Europe

Phylloxera Vastatrix

A microscopic North American aphid that feeds on the roots and leaves of grapevines. Responsible for destroying most of Europe’s vineyards from about 1860-1900. North American vines and hybrids are mostly immune and are used as rootstock for virtually all grapevines today.  

Before the days of quarantines and importation standards, humans trafficked freely in plants and animals, thereby transplanting a lot of invasive species that wrought destruction instead of the hoped for boon. When explorers touched down in the New World, they notice the grapes right away. Soon after came wine made from North America grapes. And what retched wine it was. So why not plant a bunch of European grapevines in Canada and the US. The foreign grapes flourished in this hospitable climate, but after a few years they all sickened and died, and for no known reason. Well, if that experiment wouldn’t work, maybe taking the prolific native vines back to Europe would bestow some of the classic European flavour to the wines. Worse than not a very good idea, the North American vines that were planted in France in the late 1850s and early 1860s carried an alien -- an alien that loved these defenseless grapevines. It took barely 20 years for the phylloxera aphid to destroy some 6 million acres of vineyards in France, Spain, Italy, and elsewhere. 

North American vines had managed to co-exist semi-peacefully with the bug (it infects mainly the leaves), but the European vinifera grapevines had no such resistance. Many treatments were tried -- some of them irrational and even shocking -- with no success. Because North American vines were holding their own, vinticulturalist began to experiment with cross breeding. That resulted in a large number of “French hybrid” grapes, many of which are still in production in marginal wine-growing areas. But too often the hybrids fall short in terms of the wines they produce. Sometimes they're just rejected out of hand even when superior to comparable vinifera varieties. So the other, and final, solution was to graph European vines onto North American or hybrid rootstocks. That is how it’s now done in virtually all wine regions where phylloxera is an issue. There are some exceptions; Chile, for example, has very strict importation laws and has managed to keep the bug out. These days, research into rootstocks is as important as research in grape growing and winemaking.
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More is not always better

Over-cropping

Allowing vines to produce too many grapes, resulting in wines that are hollow, watery and characterless. *

Grapevines are fussy things. Normally they just want to take over a small region of the planet and be left alone. But grape growers have other plans. They want grapes. An orderly vineyard might be nice too. So they plant in rows and prune the vines to keep down their prolific growth. Interestingly, when challenged this way, grapevines tend to produce more grapes – and that’s good for the grower. But at a certain point, the vine produces too many grapes, or at least too many to produce a quality wine.

For the grape farmer there is a trade off. Increase the yield and there will be more grapes to sell. But that lowers the grapes’ quality. In an environment where grape prices are fixed, that can be bad for the wineries that purchase grapes. If grapes are priced the same, then a ton of grapes costs the same regardless of quality. There is no incentive for the grower to increase quality since quality costs a lot to produce but would not result in a better price for the grapes. For the lowest quality of wine, this may be OK (it is far from actually a good thing) but it is impossible to make great wine from over-cropped grapes.

In an over-cropped situation, the vine has to parcel out nutrients equally. Whether the vineyard is targeting 2 tons per acre of 10 tons per acre, the vine can only deliver the same amount of nutrients. In general, you’ll find quality wine made from low yield vineyards – the 2 tons-per-acre is typical – and cheap bulk wines from the 10-tons-per-acre crops and some times more.

What constitutes low or high yield depends on a number of factors, and principally the grape variety. Some grapes can produce top quality at higher yields while others must be severely restricted. The corollary is that over-cropping is also relative, as far as the actual tonnage per acre goes, and varies from grape to grape. But whatever the ideal yield is for a given grape and terroir, over-cropping is over-cropping and the result is almost always a wine that is “character challenged”.

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Like a fine non-vintage?

Non-vintage / NV

A wine that is blended from more than one harvest year and therefore cannot be given a vintage date. Meant to be consumed “immediately”.

The term Vintage comes from the harvesting of grapes and the making of wine. The notion of dating the vintage – the harvest year – has been around since Roman times, and perhaps before. In general, we look upon a vintage date as a sign of quality in a wine. But it’s just one of many factors that determine quality. Plus there are wines that do not carry a vintage date, and that throws our concept of a “vintage product” into a tizzy.

To begin with, most champagne is non-vintage, as is port. And these are among the most revered wines available. The wines achieve their unique style by being a blend of different vintages, different harvests. The convention is to omit any meeting of vintage date in this case. Even if the vintage years that went into the blend were known, who would by a bottle labelled “1995/’97/’98/’99/2001”? So we content ourselves that the product’s quality speaks for itself, and that a vintage dated port or champagne is a bit of a bonus. By the way, these wines almost always age quite well.

A second type of non-vintage wine is a quality blend that spans more than one harvest. I’ve often seen non-vintage wines from respected producers where the specifics of the harvests were declared on the label. What the winemaker is saying is that the blending decision needed to span multiple vintages to achieve the desired quality. This really is standard procedure for all wines: if something will improve the wine, then it perhaps should be added. But if it’s from a different harvest year, you have to forgo the vintage date. It’s a bit of a risk, but if the producer has a strong reputation, then these wines can rival the vintage dated ones. They may even age well; just be sure to record the purchase date, which is as close to a vintage date as you’ll get.

The final category is wines that don’t deserve a vintage date. In most cases, these are factory wines that are cobbled together from cheap bulk wine from different sources, and likely from different vintages. Given a wine that has no known origin, it’s entirely appropriate that a vintage date be withheld. How would you go about declaring the pedigree of a wine blended from Chilean, Californian and ‘other’ wines? The date(s) would be meaningless. But likely it’s not the lack of a vintage date that makes most of us steer clear of these products.

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Somewhereness, up close

Microclimate

Often incorrectly used to refer to the climate of a sub-region or vineyard, microclimate refers more accurately to a single row or a few vines.

The best examples I’ve seen of true microclimates abound during late August. The next time you pass a growing cornfield, look for a small area that hasn’t kept up with the rest of the crop. You can often see an area of stunted corn near a tree or in a small indent or gully. This is a microclimate ... at most perhaps 200 - 300 square feet total. On the other hand, an area the size of a vineyard is a mesoclimate.

Many of the subtle and not so subtle differences we see between the same style of wine from different regions can be attributed to location or terroir. That’s why sauvignon blanc from New Zealand is so different from sauv blanc from Ontario  or South Africa. And even within a region, you can also find significant differences between different vineyards.

Some wineries have gone as far as to analyse their vineyards to identify both meso- and microclimates. We can compare this to the Cru system in place in Burgundy and Bordeaux. If you look at an elevation diagram of an appellation, you’ll see the simple AOC vineyards are mainly the low-lying plains. The higher quality vineyards lie further up the slope. And in a small section near the top of the slope you’ll see a tiny portion designated as Grand Cru.

So whether it’s a mesoclimate or a microclimate, it’s invariably the piece of land that gives birth to the wine. And if you are buying by location, always look for the most precise name possible. Single vineyard wines are more expensive than regional wines for some very good reasons.
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* from The Frugal Oenophile's Lexicon of Wine Tasting Terms

Sedimentary Journey

Lees *

Grape solids and dead yeast cells that have precipitated to the bottom of the tank or barrel during ageing. Can contribute to complexity, and facilitates malolactic fermentation.

During the first few days of fermentation, the new wine will throw off quite a bit of grape material as well as spent yeast cells – the gross lees. After racking, the wine will contain very few grape solids, and the fermentation will then produce mainly yeast cells. Lees contact is an important component to the wine’s character and in some cases is absolutely essential. For example, a ‘sur lie’ chardonnay may have spent months in the barrel, with the cellar master frequently stirring the lees into the wine (see Battonage, Jan 10/11). This gives the wine a unique biscuity character that only comes about through careful ageing on the lees. Champagne also gets much of its character from lees. The wine ferments in a closed bottle for months and perhaps years in close contact with the lees. If a wine has a creamy, yeasty or toasty character, it’s likely attributable to the lees.

Properly managed, lees add unique and desirable character, but if the winemaker is not careful, the yeast cells can begin to deteriorate, a condition called autolysis. An autolytic wine can show a number of undesirable odours including ‘beery’, ‘bready’, hydrogen sulphide, and a group of nasties called mercaptans.

You may come across a bottle that says ‘bottled on lees’. This means that the wine was transferred   directly from the barrel to the bottle, without filtering. The wine may even show a trace of cloudiness, which in this case is a bonus.
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* from The Frugal Oenophile's Lexicon of Wine Tasting Terms

It's all in the tastebuds

Jammy

Ripe, heavy, concentrated red wine flavours that take on the character of jam. Sweetish, possibly cloying. Good if not over-done.

I was recently challenged to explain ‘jammy’ and was at a loss to go much beyond what you find in my . Truth be told, I haven’t come across that many truly jammy wines. I do remember one occasion, at a small wine fair, when a respected sommelier came up to me and excitedly told me I HAD to try this wine – a robust Portuguese red. I found the wine a bit too jammy for my tastes. But before I could say anything, the sommelier blurted out “and it’s not the least bit jammy!” Hmmm…

So I decided to do a bit of research to see if anyone else was confused by this term. Here’s what I found, gleaned from about a dozen different sources:

Opinion A, Jammy is good: “sweetish”, “concentrated”, “superb extract”, “forward”, “approachable”, “fruity, tasty and pleasing”, “jumps out of the glass”, “open”;

Or

Opinion B, Jammy is not so good: “cooked”, “flavors of jam rather than fresh fruit”, “hot climate”, “overripe fruit”, “low in acid”, “not necessarily complex”, “overripe character”, “high alcohol”, “negative tasting term”, “baked, cooked or stewed fruit”, “unappealing”, “lacking in tannins.”

For a time, big juicy wines were the rage – Aussie shiraz in particular. And if a little is good, then a lot should be better, so some of these wines just got bigger and bigger, evolving into   “sweetish”, in-your-face fruit bombs with port-like alcohol. Thankfully the wines became as tiresome to the consumer as they were to the palate, and many of us began to look for a bit of subtlety and finesse instead.

You can still find overly jammy wines, but the market is definitely shifting away from them.

Best Bets in Fruit Bombs

Argentina: Malbec
Australia: Shiraz, “GSM” (grenache, syrah, mourvedre)
California: Zinfandel (not the pink stuff), Petite Sirah
Chile: Carmenere, Mourvedre
Eastern Europe: Plavac Mali
France: Cahors (Malbec)
Italy: Negroamaro, Nero d’Avola, Primitivo

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The Proof is in the Glass

ISO Tasting Glass

The International Organization for Standardization has designed and recommended a smallish (7-1/2 oz., 220 mL) tulip-shaped glass to be used for international taste testing. An excellent all-around wineglass, often sold at wineries.

I have a small tasting exercise* that I put together for a wine course I was teaching, and I try to force-fit it into tastings I’m leading. It involves pouring a sample into an ISO glass, tasting it, and then pouring the sample into other styles of wineglass. (I’m a devotee of quality wineglasses and firmly believe that the glass is an important factor.) This little comparative test proves – in a highly dramatic manner – that wineglass shape is critical.

Size, shape and material are all important in wineglass design. All three factors have to work. It’s possible for seemingly identical glasses to perform quite differently because of a small difference in any one of these element. Crystal is nice but not necessary, mostly because it tends to have thinner walls than plain glass. Size is strongly influenced by the type of wine: bigger wines tend to work better in larger glasses. However, the most important factor appears to be shape, and the tulip shape is the one to look for.

Tulip-shaped refers to the size and profile of the wineglass’s bowl. The bowl will be taller than it is wide, and the top will be narrower than the rest of the glass … picture a tulip that is just beginning to open. If you’re shopping for glasses spend a few dollars more and get a quality, name-brand glass -- preferably crystal --, that has a nice tulip shape. When dining out, also look for this shape, and if you have trouble finding a restaurant that provides decent glasses, consider taking along your own. Many people do.
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* We pit the ISO glass against four of the most commonly used restaurant wineglasses. All the glasses fared poorly compared to the ISO glass.

* from The Frugal Oenophile's Lexicon of Wine Tasting Terms

Wine/Life Balance

Harmonious

A wine with a well-balanced nose.

I was doing a book signing at a winery one afternoon when the owner came over to me to introduce me to a friend who had stopped by. Naturally we soon began to discuss the wines, and the guest asked me if I could recommend anything. I asked her if she liked riesling. She said yes, then turned to the owner and asked him what his riesling was like. He said it was “harmonious and well balanced”. I could see from the look on the woman’s face that this was not the sort of answer she was looking for. So I said “It’s really yummy.” With a broad smile she headed off to the tasting room with the winery owner in tow.

Harmonious is one of those wine words that gets used a lot but fails to convey any real information. As well, ‘harmonious and well balanced’ is redundant, since harmonious means well balanced! A wine can in fact be harmonious but not very good, or perhaps not even enjoyable. Balance and harmony are good, but are they a useful description of what we find in the bottle?

If we set the bar a bit higher, the situation worsens. According to the Oxford Canadian Dictionary, harmonious means “forming a pleasing or consistent whole.” Would anyone rush out to buy a wine that was described as ‘consistent’?

I prefer to write this one off as bafflegab and suggest instead that we look for more meaningful terms -- terms that will give people a sense of what the wine is actually like, words such as ‘yummy’ for example.

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A Name Game

Generic Name

A ‘jug wine’ bearing the name of one of the classic Old World wine regions.

For decades Canada and a few other new world wine regions have been producing and selling huge quantities of low-end wines that infringed on traditional and legally protected European wine names. In 2003 Canada and Europe signed an agreement that would see the end of generic wine names in Canada. What’s bothersome about this agreement is the 10-year horizon. Generic wines are made predominantly by huge wine conglomerates that regularly churn out new names and new labels for their low-end wines. So why do they need 10 years to switch the few names that are applied to some of the worst wines available?

You can still find these wines on store shelves, principally in Ontario, the US and Australia. Borrowed names include champagne, port, sherry, chablis, burgundy, ‘sauterne’, chianti, and a few others. Usually the only resemblance these wines have to their namesakes is colour. For example, California chablis is usually made from a very cheap grape whereas true chablis is 100% chardonnay. Canadian sauterne is an interesting interpretation. It’s a dry white wine whereas Bordeaux’s sauternes is a prized sweet wine. And aside from being low end, the wines are banged into shape using any winemaking technique that is legal -- including additives – and are the vinus equivalent of no-name bologna.

The one problem with phasing out the European wine names is that it leaves port- and sherry-style wines out in the cold. The name port, for example, is well understood and has been used to describe these wines for decades. Once it becomes illegal to use these names, fortified wine makers will have to get creative to find a new way to refer to these wines generally. (I know of a wine called ‘Starboard’ but that’s perhaps too esoteric.)
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The Long & Short of It

Finish

A complex sequence of flavours and aromas after swallowing or spitting. Wines are judged in part on the quality and duration of the finish. Sometimes called the farewell.

The full sensory impact of wine comes in three stages: attack, development and finish. We sip the wine and have our first impression. The wine then reveals more of its character on the ‘mid palate’, the development. Finally there is the finish -- those last few moments before the flavour and aroma impression fades completely.

The finish (close, farewell, etc.) is an important part of what a wine has to offer. A “short” wine has a finish that lasts a mere second or two. Beyond that, there’s nothing to savour. A great wine, on the other hand, can last for much longer: a minute or more. The French have a word for the length of the finish: caudalie, where one caudalie is equal to one second of length.

The finish consists of both length: how long it lasts, and after taste: the quality of the impression. Sometimes a wine’s character is only fully revealed in the aftertaste. Bitterness and ‘corkiness’, for example, can sometimes be sensed in the finish even though it was not evident in the mid-palate. But we much prefer the other scenario, when the aftertastes is as good or better than what came before. And if it lasts a long time, well that’s about as good as it gets. One caudalie, two caudalie, three caudalie...
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* from The Frugal Oenophile's Lexicon of Wine Tasting Terms

A Fountain of Youth?

Égrappage *

Partial or complete removal of grape stalks prior to fermentation, usually by machine. Results in reduced tannins, making for softer, earlier maturing, fruitier red wines. Always done for white wines. Some stems may be left in to keep the ‘marc’ loose during pressing.

The long-held belief that all wine should be aged for long periods hearkens back to when winegrapes were pressed in whole bunches -- stems, seeds and all. The classic image of Oporto’s “black feet” stomping grapes doesn’t show that the stems are being stomped just as aggressively as the grapes. And the same with primitive pressing technology: the stems were included with the grape mash. Often the result was wines that had very high tannin content. In fact, many old style wines were so tannic that they were hard to tolerate until some of the tannins had softened from cellar ageing -- possibly for many years.

A fairly modern improvement in grape processing is the crusher/destemmer. This machine crushes the grape bunches to release the juice, and then strips away the stems, leaving fermentable juice that is relatively stem free. As a red wine macerates and ferments, it extracts tannin from the stems and skins, and from the pits to some degree (although these too are often removed). When the stems are removed before fermentation, the wines emerge less tannic, softer, and earlier maturing. A classic example is Brunello. Traditionally these wines took 10 to 20 years to soften to drinkability, but with more modern techniques -- including égrappage -- the wines can be ready to open well before their tenth birthday. (I have had Brunello as young as 5 years that was perfectly balanced and drinkable.)

Égrappage gives the winemaker another area of control over the wine: Remove all the stems for an early-drinking, fruit forward wine; leave in a small percentage of stems for added structure and longevity; or maximize stem content to create a traditional cellar monster. 

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* from The Frugal Oenophile's Lexicon of Wine Tasting Terms

All That Sparkles

Diamonds/Gravel *

Harmless tartrate crystals from tartaric acid that precipitate out of finished wine, especially when chilled. Can be a good sign, showing that the wine has not been over processed.

Acids are an important component of all wines. They provide structure (backbone), contribute to a wine’s impression of freshness, and help make wine food friendly. There are roughly a half dozen different acids to be found in wine, but tartaric acid is by far the most plentiful.

Winemakers put a lot of effort into managing acid, beginning in the vineyard where getting the sugar/acid balance just right is a primary goal. Depending on local rules, the winemaker may ‘adjust’ acid before starting fermentation. All through its stay at the winery, the wine’s acid will be monitored. One trick winemakers use to lower acidity is to ‘cold stabilize’ the wine prior to bottling. This entails refrigerating the wine to just above freezing for up to a week, which forces the tartaric acid to form crystals, softening the wine. (Incidentally, the crystals are later scraped from the tank and sold as a basic ingredient in baking powder.)

You may have seen these tartrate crystals in a bottle or glass, or on the cork. (These can look like bits of glass.) This actually is a good sign. It means the winemaker has not processed the dickens out of the wine and that it had ample acidity when bottled. Diamonds, like all sediment, is a good thing, although getting a mouthful of it is rather off-putting. If you see a lot of crystals in the bottle, pour very gently or -- better -- decant the wine off the sediment and enjoy!
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* from The Frugal Oenophile's Lexicon of Wine Tasting Terms

A Vine Distinction

Clone *

Winegrape vines are propagated from cuttings; therefore, each plant is a “clone” of its parent. Varieties can also mutate into a number of clonal variations over time. Most vineyards are planted with a selected variety of clones of the same grape.

There are an estimated 10,000 varieties of winegrape, with roughly 6,000 varieties currently used to make wine. Yet despite this wealth of choice, there are relatively few winegrapes in widespread use.

The winegrape vine is somewhat prone to mutation. One theory is that all grapevines (at least in Europe) are descended from a distant relative of the Muscat grape, which proliferated in the region of the Black Sea. Once humans decided to farm rather than roam, they began to cultivate. It was natural to save the seeds from the best examples to plant for next year. And as with carrots or wheat, this also applied to winegrapes. The grape’s propensity to mutate was both good news and bad news. A new version of the plant might create an even better wine than its parent plant. But if you can’t predict what the plant’s seed will produce, how do you recreate that special variety? The answer is to plant parts of the original plant rather than the seeds. In effect, you simply clone the desired plant.

There you have plant husbandry in a nutshell. Plant the sticks, not the seeds. That way you know that the resulting vine will produce exactly the same grapes as the parent plant ... mostly. There is still the issue of spontaneous mutation. That too has a silver lining. Take that interesting stick (mutations quite often show up as a single cane on a parent vine) and plant it. So when your pinot noir vine produces a cane filled with light blue grapes, plant that cane and call it “pinot gris”.

Sometimes a mutation will be almost the same as the original plant, but with some characteristic that is worth preserving. That cane, too, can be isolated and cloned. Pinot noir has an estimated 1000 clones, all of which produce a wine recognizable as pinot noir. In Ontario, winemakers are crazy about a clone called chardonnay musqué. The wine is chardonnay in every way, but it has a wonderful muscat element not found in typical chardonnays.
Part of the art and science of planting a vineyard is choosing which grapes and which clones of those grapes to plant. Often the vineyard will be planted with a few carefully selected clones of the basic vine, partly for some genetic diversity but more to achieve a certain type of wine.
-tfo

* from The Frugal Oenophile's Lexicon of Wine Tasting Terms

A Stirring Tale

Battonage

The act of stirring the lees in vat or barrel. Helps avoid production of hydrogen sulphide and facilitates absorption of wood tannins and lees flavours

There are two schools of thought on stirring wine. One is to stir often; the other is to not stir at all. The decision to stir or not stir a ‘working’ wine will encourage the development of certain characteristics. In the case of a red wine, the wine will be vigorously manipulated during its first week or so of fermentation to keep the skins and grape solids in contact with the juice. A white wine might also be stirred during this primary stage of fermentation to help distribute the growing yeast cells and to make sure they are exposed to the nutrients in the juice. Some winemakers will stir a working wine up to three times a day.

Once fermentation has pretty much finished, stirring takes on a different mission. The majority of wines are racked into clean vessels and left alone to mature in peace. Some purists even insist that disturbing the wine during this stage can bruise it (whatever that means). If a wine is undergoing malolactic fermentation, which is frequently done with red wines and with chardonnay, then stirring the lees will help foster the malolactic bacteria and bring out the desired soft ‘sur lie’ quality.

Lees are dead yeast cells, and mixing them into the wine helps integrate toasty and biscuity qualities into the wine. You’ll find this character in sur lie chardonnay, vinho verde, and quality sparkling wines, especially champagne. Sometimes the wine is bottled directly from the barrel, in which case the label may say “Bottled on lees”or “Unfiltered” and the wine may show a trace of fine sediment. The resulting wines generally show more character than those that have not undergone lee stirring.
-tfo

The Trouble with Angel’s

 

Angel’s Share

A quaint term that refers to the wine that goes missing from the barrel during ageing. Real world cause is evaporation through the pores and seams of the barrel. Can amount to a loss of 5% or more over a year of barrel ageing, which must be periodically topped up. Contributes to a wine’s concentration

For centuries, winemakers have turned to wooden barrels for the final ageing of their best wines. Usually made from oak, wine barrels are held together with nothing more than a few reinforcing rings -- no glue, no nails. Even the heads are sealed with simple strips of bulrush. The result is a barrel that is water-tight and very nearly air-tight. And it’s that “very nearly” part that’s important here. Microscopic spaces between the staves and the heads and around the bung hole allow a minute amount of evaporation. Over time, which ranges from a few months to several years, liquid evaporates through the various gaps in the barrel, to be replaced by air. This condenses the wine, making it richer while adding subtle amounts of oxygen. The loss -- the angel’s share -- can range from 5% of the volume to as much as 20% before the wine is ready to offer to the market. On the down side, that loss in volume must be regularly made up. While the ‘micro-oxygenation’ that barrels add is beneficial, too much will often yield an oxidized wine, so winemakers routinely top up the barrels with the same (or similar) wine kept in reserve. In the case of older or large barrels, it’s principally the angel’s share at work, since these barrels contribute little in the way of oak character. Either way, the finished wine is softer, more complex and more concentrated than its younger self.

 

"It's so easy when you know the language" - Martin Mull

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Elaboration

The act or process of producing, refining or improvement.
Also a term used to describe the entire winemaking process, from grape to bottle.

After a rather impressive start some 7-8 years ago, my newsletter went from a somewhat reliable publication to something that appeared with roughly the frequency of Halley’s Comet. To be honest, I simply ran out of things to write about. I don’t mind confessing that because I am not a work-a-day journalist with a gift for pulling topics out of thin air whatever the weather.

No, my newsletter was not journalism. It was a chronicling of my journey of discovery. Can we then conclude that I’ve discovered all there is to know about wine? Far from it. But I have run out of topics that require the all-consuming research that I’m inclined to do. Plus I am loath to fall into that habit of seasoned journalists of revisiting topics -- that does not interest me.

Thankfully I have hit upon an idea that I think I can warm up to. It appears that I am the definitive keeper of wine language (at least, in North America). My is still the most complete collection of wine terms available, so I’m going to run with that. My goal with the Lexicon was to provide dictionary-length definitions of the most common wine terms. Of course there’s more to any story, so what I’d like to do here is to occasionally pull out one of those wine terms and then elaborate on it. With nearly 650 terms in the Lexicon, I figure I’m good for about 12 years before I have to roll out a Volume II of the Lexicon. (Just kidding: Volume II is in the works.)
 
-TFO