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We’ve arrived. If you have been following along, we have discussed the concepts of balance, and complexity, touched on Terroir, and even addressed some theories as to where flavor comes from and how to taste. Let’s shift gears and tie this all together and ask the obvious: what makes a good wine, good?
Nuance
I would argue that there are four factors: Nuance, Harmony, Elegance, Length, and all of these tie into our prior discourse. Nuance is the first force for good in a wine. Nuance is the layers of aromas that contribute to flavor, and are the driving force behind complexity. When a wine has nuance, it has barely detectible aromas that were referenced earlier in the lessons: tertiary characteristics. Nuance may also imply that the wine may have some age, or simply may have been aged or exposed to oxygen slowly within the confines of the winemaking process.
These subtleties would include touches of earthiness, think Geosmin, that smell of dead leaves, or stale water. Often another great subtlety in wines would be the Brettanomyces, especially in a Rhône Valley wine. These would be flavors of horseyness, manure, straw, hay, or even simply, barnyard. Where an issue arises is when getting the amount right. Winemakers don’t have measuring cups with these chemicals, they must rely on natural processes.
This can often imply that if you taste these flavors, that perhaps they have been encouraged by organic, biodynamic, or sustainable viticulture. In the second unit, we touched on this subject with regards to percieved floral characteristics that one can encounter when nosing the glass. Sometimes the herbaceous nature of what we regard in a wine can be due to cross pollination, the breeze of oils, and vineyard conditions wafting onto the grape skins and diluting the natural yeasts with those of other plants: also possible.
Soil also plays a factor in complexity as well, some of the chemicals native to wine that make up what we know as mouthfeel can deliver certain flavors in broader capacity to your olfactory than others: notably that illusive minerality that winos are always raving about. Remember, minerality in wine is the result of fermentation esters, not actual minerals. But really nuance just implies a wide array of different characteristics that are on display subtlety.
Harmony
Subtlety is the key to fine wine, that's why we use the term nuance, and not complexity on its own. This is where harmony plays a role. Harmony is not balance like we discussed in unit three - though it includes balance. Harmony is the accord of all of the elements that make up flavor in the wine, and the balance therein. Nobody wants a wine that tastes, “distinctly of manure.” Though I would expect some flavors of manure in a Bandol or southern Rhône blend, I certainly do not want this flavor on full display.
Harmony, then, is how well all of these elements meld together with each other. Does one stand out like SpaghettiO’s on a pizza? Like a passage from the Message paraphrase in a properly-exegeted biblical sermon? Likewise, harmony can imply proper melding together of all of the elements in a wine. If there is a profile of flavors that don’t go together very well, the wine is in disarray. The parts don’t harmonize very well.
Perhaps as well, there are one or two elements that cause another flavor to be on full display. I once tried a white wine, I won’t say from where, that tasted of celery, and white pepper, but upon swallowing I was left with a mouth numbing flavor of dish soap. It was properly foul. Harmony simply means that all of the tertiary flavors fit nicely with the secondary flavors, and they all blend well under the umbrella of the primary flavors.
It also includes the overall balance that we discussed earlier as well. Balance is crucial to achieve harmony - no one wants to drink a wine that’s too sweet or acetic that it distracts from flavor. An unbalanced wine that is too rich can dominate with primary characteristics, and then lacks that illusive nuance needed to achieve harmony.
Elegance
Elegance involves the wine’s texture; it’s kind of the feng shui of the wine - how the furniture is arranged; and it encompasses two major focuses: stratification, and texture. Stratification is how the wine is layered - when do the different elements of complexity kick in, and when are they most noticeable. Does the flavor of manure hit you in a wine before the flavor of minerality?
Realistically, we profile all of out flavors as primary, secondary, and tertiary, because that is the order in which we’d like these flavors to hit us. I know I keep using this example, but unordered wine can mean a split second mouthful of manure, even if it is just a dainty whiff. All components relating to a wine’s flavor should be ordered and structured. We want layers of flavor.
When you hear people address a wine’s high notes, or low notes, this concept is what they’re referencing. High notes make up the lighter flavors that come on later, like floral characteristics, low notes are the heavier, darker flavors of fruit, or earthiness that set in immediately and carry the tone of the wine: these are common descriptors of the wine’s overall bouquet. Wine bouquet is a harmonized, and Elegant aroma. If a wine has a Bouquet, this implies elegance. Bouquet is generally reserved for wines that show signs of age. All of the components align properly and are represented in a suitable order.
But structure is required for elegance as well. Structure is the textural component. When you actually taste a wine, good structure should be one of the things that you look for. Structure is related to mouthfeel, but has more to do with tannin. If you recall, mouthfeel is the weight of a wine - extra sugar means more glycerol, and more alcohol, which adds heat (burn in the throat) and makes wine feel rich on the palette.
Tannin
Tannin is a major component pertaining to elegance. Tannin are a polyphonic molecules found in all plant material, including bark, leaves, and grape skins. Even larger quantities are found in grape seeds. They get into red wines via the crushed skins of the grapes. Too much crushing can break the seeds, known as pips, releasing far too much tannin into a wine, and rendering undrinkable, so winemakers are careful to avoid that folly.
On the palette, tannin presents itself as a rubber-glove, sometimes flour-like, mouth drying sensation in the back of the throat, and it can be why people associate wines with more tannin as being very dry. It’s a very acetic molecule as well. The Ph is quite high in tannin itself, so when it brushes up against your taste buds this can add a quality of acid to a wine.
Tannins bind to protein, and amino acids, both of which are found in wine. But they are also found in saliva, so tannin in wine will often dry your mouth because its binding to your saliva, and absorbing the water. If you want an example of a tannin-heavy drink, leave a tea bag in a black tea, and let it sit until the water is cold. Take a drink. You should taste both the acidity and grippy texture of tannin.
Tannins are the healthy component of wine which harbor the wine’s anti-oxidant properties. Sagrantino is a varietal from Italy which harbors the most tannin of any other wine. It also has some of the lowest sugar levels, and transfers the most antioxidants into the bloodstream.
Tannin is really only found in red wines, or orange white wines, that were aged on the skins. If a white wine shows some gritty bitterness in the back of the throat, it’s a good bet that these are trace polyphenols that are found alongside tannin in the skins - we call this bitterness Phenolic Bitterness. Phenolic bitterness tastes like the bitter, drying flavor you may experience when you eat a chewable multi-vitamin.
The effects of this polyphenol can also be felt in the aging process, that is, specifically oak aging. Like any other plant, the oak tree has polyphenols and tannin inside of all of its components, including the meat used to make the barrels. Throughout the barrel’s lifespan it will pass these tannins onto the wine, but in much smaller amounts than the grape skins will. As a barrel gets older, and harbors more an more vintages of wine, this transfer of tannin becomes more and more miniscule.
Oxygen is the best remedy for a grippy wine. All wines leave the winery with somewhat heavy-handed tannin, but by the time racking has been completed, some of these tannins have softened due to the presence of oxygen. With time oxygen acts to soften tannin, and refine the molecule so that it looses its sandpaper-like texture and overtime fades into more of a silky ribbon-like texture.
Ribbony texture can be a feature of any wine, but aging must be completed in order to achieve this. All aging vessels allow some oxygen inside of them, including the cork on bottles, and of course the porous oak barrels. Minuscule exposure to oxygen is important, because too much oxygen can mean the wine spoils, and begins to turn to vinegar - resulting in volitile acidity which we covered in unit two.
A very key sidenote on aging: realistically, follow the 95/5 rule. Only about 5% of wines were genuinely made to be aged in the bottle by consumers. In the majority of cases, even wine from very prestigious regions is meant to be opened right up and drunk immediately upon purchase. Don't expect to see a whole lot of positive change in a bottle that costs less than $100 or so. There is a trend in winemaking today to highlight wines which can be drink upon return from the store - this means that is most bottles, aging only results in lost fruit character. Winemakers are changing winemaking methodology to soften tannins before sale, and expose the wines to optimal amounts of oxygen during the winemaking process to make wines present to drink. Because of this added effort, it is not uncommon to see some minimal tertiary characteristics in a youthful wine.
Allowing small parts of oxygen means wine aging takes a long time to soften the tannins, but the layered complexity that the process affords is worth the wait. Without this time, just funneling wine during the winemaking process to soften tannin, results in uneven softening, and phenolic bitterness from other polyphenols that need longer oxygen exposure timelines.
Decanting
Decanting is an abbreviated expression of this concept. Decanting allows us, the drinkers, to expose the wine to oxygen to open up the flavors of the wine, sort the tannin, and remove sediment. This is what decanting is for, nothing more, nothing less. There are two predominant reasons to decant a wine.
The first, is that it is an old wine, and there may be some sediment at the bottom that you wish to strain off. The decanting helps to awaken old wines and expose their tertiary characteristics far better. Another reason, is because the wine is slightly reduced, or not presenting its full flavor profile. We call either of these bottling mishaps, tightness. The wine might taste acetic slightly, and be kind of boring, lacking much flavor of anything besides sour red, or black fruit. It may also smell of gunpowder or sulfer slightly upon the nose. The last reason to decant, is to soften the tannins of a presumably harsh wine - this is more common in newer wines.
There are different types of decanters, so be sure you don’t go for a whiskey decanter, because that will not help much, you need a decanter with a medium or wide base. Realistically, it’s no benefit to have a ton of fancy glassware, just go for a standard wide-base decanter. These are universal. The need to decant in all honesty, is going to be very rare. And for all that is tasteful in the world, do not get a decanter with a lid, please? It’s also best to chill your decanter, before you pour the wine in.
Give the wine a few good sloshes about in the decanter. It will take about thirty minutes on a new wine and sometimes up to three hours or so to fully decant an old wine. If you are expecting guests it may be desirable to open the wine well before they arrive, so you have a bottle ready. What’s easier, is to pour a new wine the wine into deep glasses, and let it sit for fifteen or so minutes, avoiding decanting entirely, if the new wine needs to breathe.
Length
When people are talking about good structure, they are referring to the pleasant feel of tannin on the tongue. There are of course un-aged wines which have decent, very pleasant tannin, but they would lack the structure that an aged wine would have, that being the ribbon-like texture. The last thing anyone wants from a wine is a bitter, astringent and sandpaper like finish to their wine. All of these mouthfeel components contribute to a wine’s elegance on the palette.
While we are on the subject of tannin, it is time to examine the most crucial component of a wine’s worthiness, and that is, finish. Tannin directly influences finish in that it carries the drinker into finish. The most crucial element of finish is not the swallowing of the wine, but the actual length that the flavor and tannin linger in your mouth.
Tannin is the vehicle that drives the drinker over the finish line and into the wine’s length, and this is the most crucial component. This is how Grand Cru is measured against Premier Cru in many regions. First of all we want a wine that has silky tannins, and no phenolic bitterness. Remember tannin is mouth-drying, and unpleasant when in ineloquent quantity.
If tannin dries up the throat, this is a dead finish. If alcohol burns the throat, or is not seated in the blend as well as it should be, this is also a dead finish. If glycerine is jammy, and flabby and coats the mouth, this is a dead finish too.
Furthermore, the length should carry the full bouquet of flavors at the climax of the wines expression. Manure should not be the driving flavor in the length. The bouquet should fade beautifully as time carries on, and all of the flavors should subside in just about the order in which they appeared. Length, then, is the metric by which nuance, harmony, and elegance can be measured - the initial profile of the wine must be pleasant in order for the length to unravel the flavor components in the wine.
How long should the finish be? Well, in Burgundy, the birthplace of length, producers unanimously affirm: quality wine should show its full bouquet thirty seconds after swallowing for village-level wines, one minute for premiers crus, and a whopping two minutes for grands crus. But realistically, a good drinking wine should show its bouquet for at least thirty seconds prior to swallowing. These are solid metrics that you can use to judge a wine’s quality by more than just whether you like it or not.
You may have seen the one hundred point system for rating wines before at your local shop, or perhaps even associated with wine deals online. If you recall, in the last installment of this course, I talked a little bit about the Robert Parker Wine Advocate, and his affect on the wine styles of the last thirty or so years, well, he is the man who invented the one hundred point system that is used by most major publications.
Today, you can see wine labels decorated with ribbons that say, “96pts!” by such-a-such magazine or so-and-so whomever, and while these can be helpful to those familiar with these names, but they can also be slightly distracting to those who aren’t. If you don’t know whether you like the palette of the reviewer, and you have no solid indications of the metrics with which they judged the 96pt wine, the rating system means very little besides flashy marketing.
We’ve already been over stream of consciousness note taking, but let’s revisit this concept and make some additions. If you recall, we first think the aromas, then taste, swirl in the palette and write what first comes to your mind. Head back to Vincent Girardin Santenay, and La Tour de Bessan.
Review your stream of consciousness notes from earlier. This time, let’s think about the flavors in terms of the chart above. Swirl the wine again and take a smell. Let the aromas linger for a second and see if your initial thoughts still make sense now. Now take a drink. Between the smells, and tastes - ortho and retro nasal, respectively, can you come up with good examples of primary, secondary, and tertiary characteristics? Can you find at least two of each? How about three, or four?
Now consider how the timing. Consider whether the flavors come on in a pleasant manner. When does each one arrive on the palette, and does it do so in a pleasant order? Are there any off-flavors? Write down anything that seems off to you. Consider the balance Too. Does the wine seem to have good balance between acidity, and sugar? Maybe it leans one way or the other for you, or maybe it feels pretty well-balanced.
Lastly, observe the wine for structure, and reconsider mouthfeel. This follows along wine balance and flavor, but the wine shouldn’t coat your mouth, or feel sickly, or hot in your throat, and it certainly shouldn’t be tastelessly light, watery, or on the opposite end, grippy, sandpaper-like, or harsh. Realistically, both of these wines should be pretty good all-rounders, I wouldn’t pick unpleasant wines for this task. But consider which style of the two you like better, and why. This is an awesome moment for further reflection, as you write your tasting notes.
Last, and perhaps most importantly, count the finish. Set a timer if you need to, and count out how long the wine feels as though it’s still in your mouth. Remember, this truly is the test of a noteworthy wine. The finish on a decent drinking wine should be at least thirty seconds, and you should be able to taste the vast majority of the wines bouquet, or aroma.
Let’s give these wines a rating. Now of course there is no scientific rating system for wine, wine is totally and completely subjective. But, there are some things that we can definitely count on when it comes to wine quality that we can rate on a categorical basis. Again, these are Nuance, Harmony, Elegance, and Length. I’ve now bored you to death defining them ad nauseam, so I’ll spare you the rehash.
I prefer to use the much more old-fashioned twenty point system, and give the ratings these clearly defined categories - the things I check for as I’m tasting the wine. As I write these notes, I’m mentally scoring each category, and then using the stream-of-consciousness method of taking notes, bearing in mind the categories that I’m considering.
The twenty point system is neater and cleaner in my opinion while still giving a real feel of my perceptions. My issue with the one hundred point system is that its too finite. Who is to day that one wine is one point superior to another that you had last month? Who is going to remember something that they tried so long ago enough to decide that it does or does not deserve 1/100th of a point over another wine? Besides that, I rarely see anyone give a score lower than an eighty - surely not all the world’s fine wines can be 95s all the time? Sometimes I think half of these people are awarding points to these wines just for existing, and being a wine, and being present on the table of wines to review.
The twenty point system gives me a five point spread over the one hundred point system and allows me to account for a wine’s arability, ageworthiness, and typicity without arguing over whether one wine truly deserves the one point marker over another. But at the end of the day, you can use whatever rating system you want. I give a wine five points for meeting each of the four categories, which means a truly youthful but excellent drinking wine can expect to score a sixteen.
Nuance - For a full five points, a wine should have two notable secondary characteristics and two tertiary. All should blend well with the wine and not be offensive or stand-offish. Points removed for any missing, or obscene flavors.
Harmony - For a full five points, a wine should have a perfect balance between acidity and sweetness. The flavors should all work well together.
Elegance - For a full five points, a wine must have good tannic structure, and the mouth feel should be very pleasant. Points deducted for flabbiness, lightness, grippy tannin or un-timely flavors.
Length - Four a full five points, the finish must last two and a half minutes. It must contain all elements of the wines flavor profile, and must be pleasant.
NUANCE
3 - This wine lacks tertiary characteristics due to its youth. Secondary characteristics of lily and cinnamon.
HARMONY
5 - Everything is where it should be, all flavors are pleasant acidity and sugar balance is good.
ELEGANCE
3 - Wine is well layered. Tannin is on the firm side. Not sandpaper, but certainly not ribbon either.
LENGTH
3 - All flavors remained. Average finish length of thirty seconds.
Smells of fresh ripe strawberry, raspberry, white lily, and cinnamon-stewed quince. Some wet stone. Bit of a bite. Light acidity layers well. Decent finish.
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Put together your own notes and score for La Tour de Bessan. I would then urge you to view the chapters on Burgundy, and Bordeaux, which go over more in-depth nuance of the two areas.