In considering what it is about wine that brings me such joy and boundless desire for discovery, I keep coming back to 4 words: magic, memory, food and culture. Let’s look at the magic of it, and come back to the others in future posts.
The humble wine grape can be transformed to present combinations of a thousand different aromas and flavours in a glass. It’s no wonder many civilisations over time treated it as a miracle, a gift from the gods (that may also have had something to do with the mind altering effect, but stay with me). In the age of science this transformation of flavour is no less astonishing.
Despite all starting as grape juice, there are only a very few wines that actually present a fresh grape flavour in the glass (Moscato d’Asti, for example. Cagliero make an excellent version). No doubt you’ve heard or read someone describing a wine with terms such as green apples, or black cherries or toast (or one of my favourites, dead ants, but I’ll come back to that in the “Wine is Memory” piece). That’s not just wine snobs being wine snobs - those flavours can literally be there. The base juice and winemaking process have created the chemically identical aroma compounds that exist in those foods being described (or other non food scents, like barnyard, another personal favourite linked to memories, even if it is also sometimes associated with faults in the wine).
Sometimes those compounds are ethereal, vanishing just as you detect them. Sometimes they are overpowering and persistent. Sometimes you will only detect them when someone mentions the flavour and then wonder how you didn’t notice it before. Some you will love, some you will hate. Some are the sign of great winemaking and terroir (e.g. look for the roses, cherries and bay leaves in Cecilia Monte’s Barbaresco), some are the sign of significant flaws (e.g. wet cardboard as a sign of cork taint). Industrial wine can be one dimensional with just a few flavours, designed to make them “easy” to drink for a wide range of palates, but a well crafted wine can surprise you with its complexity of flavours. The last time we tasted Caterina Carli’s Brunello and Rosso for example, they each had at least ten distinct flavours despite coming from the same vineyards. It will be fascinating to keep coming back to them over the years.
Every wine is like a fingerprint of flavour waiting to be discovered for the first time. It’s easy enough to find two wines that are very similar, but impossible to find two that are identical. There’s more to great wine than just flavour, but that diversity and uniqueness gets to the heart of the magic of wine. And while that magic is pure science, the process that leads to the final compounds in the glass is so complex that a producer’s approach to viticulture and winemaking technique is very much an artform. Technical knowledge is important but experience and instinct in the context of a particular terroir make all the difference.
All of the ultimate flavour compounds can be traced back to one of three stages in the life of a wine:
- The type of grape and where and how it was grown (Primary characteristics). These flavours tend to be floral, fruits, herbs and spices.
- The winemaking process (Secondary characteristics). This can deliver bakery, dairy, wood, chocolate, coffee and vanilla flavours.
- Age (Tertiary characteristics). This might deliver nuts, umami, earth, sweets and more spices.
Once a variety is planted, some of those characteristics are decided by nature (the geography, climate and weather of a vineyard in particular), but the rest result from thousands of decisions by the producer, to intervene, or not, and in what way, and at what time. Every one of those decisions will lead to a different wine, with a different mix or prevalence of flavour compounds. Finding your favourite producers, who make decisions that lead to a magical wine, can be one of the great joys of your journey through wine, your Vino Cammino. We hope you’ll find some of them with us!
Unfortunately, the language of wine, driven by these magical flavour transformations, can be intimidating for people just starting out on their wine journey. If wine just tastes like wine for someone, hearing about the dozen flavours someone else is tasting could naturally lead that person to assume they’re missing something. That they don’t have a good palate. That wine isn’t their thing. But, like any good hobby, it just takes practice. So next time you have a glass of wine in front of you, drink it mindfully, take a moment to appreciate the magic, and uniqueness, of the flavours you’re tasting, the people behind them, and the journey a few grapes took to create it.