Wine Colors:

What to Look for in the Glass

The Facets of Wine

Once upon a time, I found myself walking down a secret hall in a secret building in San Francisco, California in search of a secret treasure. The building and the halls looked for all the world like a place you’d store cleaning supplies in.

Most of the doors inside were as unmarked and as unremarkable as the rest of the place, but I had a guide. I was with somebody who knew the secret— that it was in fact a whole building filled with jewels. For obvious reasons they weren’t into advertising what was in those offices or that building either one.

From the outside, it might as well as been a bus stop. If you had to ask, you probably shouldn’t be there. At any rate, no one was going to tell you anyway.

My partner in the jewelry business knew what to say and where to knock and then, there I was, sitting in front of a man I will call Benjamin in an office roughly the size of a broom closet. Benjamin had been selling loose stones for over 50 years. He had an old beat up metal cabinet the size of a filing case that looked like it had been fetched out of the trash.

But ah, ye of little faith. That cabinet had drawers and drawers filled with diamonds and rubies and emeralds and all manner of gemstones that I never even heard of. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of gemstones in that old cabinet. You just had to know where to look.

When we asked to see a specific stone he would hold it up in front of a light on his desk so we could see the sparkle and the clarity. It was exactly the same gesture I had seen winemakers do in wine cellars all over the world.

When a winemaker pulls a sample of a particular wine from the barrel, they light a candle and hold it up behind the wine glass for the same reason that Benjamin held up a light behind the jewels. The color of both is a marker of quality. The Ruby is worth a lot less if it is cloudy. It’s the same with wine.

Both jeweler and winemaker are both looking for the same thing—sparkle, clarity and color. Also, flaws. In both gemstones and wine, the colors leap to life when the light comes through them. Whether it’s a candle or a lamp or the sun, the burst of color tells you a lot about what you are holding in your

The Color of Wine

chart in image is available from www.winefolly.com

Where does the color come from?

With practice you will develop a library of wine color in your mind just as you develop a library of aromas. Then you can associate different color variations with the grapes, winemaking techniques or aging that causes them.

When the grapes are harvested they are taken to a press of one kind or another. Wine presses are a whole different esoteric subject but they all end up doing the same thing—they press the juice out of the wine. There are other ways to get the juice out but we’ll stick to wine presses for this purpose.

The juice is then left in contact with the skins for varying amounts of time during which it extracts the color from the grape skins in the form of chemical compounds like anthocyanins and tannins (which effect the taste and longevity of the wine). If you learn to spell “anthocyanins” you can be a big hit at parties.

If you just stare meaningfully at the glass and say, “Yes, I’d say the anthocyanin extraction in this one is a little underdeveloped” then most people will nod wisely and not mess with you.

Anthocyanins turn things purple—grapes of course, but also cabbage, raspberries, blueberries and autumn leaves among other things. Tannin is a preservative that makes the astringent component of wines. They protect the fruit in older wines. As the wine ages, the tannins disappear.

For these kind of things it’s better to see what is happening than just read about it. I like the video of Bordeaux winemaker Julien Miquel here because it shows you what all these processes look like and he’s clear in his explanations.

Once you’ve seen them (and smelled them if you ever get a chance) it all becomes quite wondrous. Without giving away the whole video I’ll just highlight one thing which is much better to see than to read:

The red grapes aren’t red inside. They are clear. It’s only the skins that give color to the wine.

The color in white wines comes from the grape skins of “white grapes” (which are actually yellow green). Generally they aren’t left on the skins very long—or at all—and and they are fermented in stainless steel tanks instead of barrels so the color of “white” wines is really on a scale of basically white to yellow to brown.

Sometimes Chardonnay may be fermented and/or stored in barrels which imparts a deeper color and possibly longer life to the wine (depending on the type of barrel and length of time the wine is aged).

Madeiras are aged longer in barrels and develop a deeper yellow brown color. Some Madeiras can last 100 years or more and turn a deep dark brown after decades of aging.

Sauvignon Blanc, Rieslings and Pinot Grigios generally range from clear to a medium yellow or yellow green. They are mostly meant to be consumed within 2 years of bottling so they don’t have time to develop deep colors.

The color won’t tell you whether the wine is good but it can suggest it’s bad (brown or cloudy). You can’t really know until you taste it. Some of the greatest wines I’ve ever had were very old and the color of a grocery sack.

Bonus: Learning to See

The color of wine is not set in the way most people think of it —that is, as being one color all the time. Color itself is not fixed the way most people think of it. Orange is not the same orange in different situations. Take a look at the example below.

The brain is terrible at recognizing and remembering color. This has lead to many fights and misunderstandings between winemakers, owners and salespeople who are not trained in color—not to mention, wine judges and you know, customers.

Color changes depending on what color is next to it. Color also ends up being a major emotional part of how you decide to buy a wine or anything else—color in both the wine and on the label.

Winemakers don’t spend a lot of time on the vagaries of color theory. They blend to a specific color but they don’t need to think about how it might look different in different situations.

In some cases, you can improve your guests’ (or potential buyers’) reaction to a wine just by moving it closer to the window. For example, let’s take the Rosé in the photo below.

The colors in the blue mat, the painting on the wall, the red bowl, and the rose petals all effect your perception of the exact color of the wine. So does the fact that this glass is next to a floor-to-ceiling window and has a white candle behind it.

This same glass in the living room at night on a brown coffee table under a table lamp is literally a different color. And, it elicits a different emotional response from your brain.

Perhaps most critical, it changes your brain’s emotional response too.

Color is context. Artists and lighting designers go through rigorous training to learn to see differently —-to learn to see what is actually there. Most people, including winemakers and wine critics, do not. That leaves them open to widely varying reactions to the same color. Arguments sometimes ensue. Alcohol may be a factor.

Learning to see wine color will effect how you see color in the rest of your life. It can deepen and enrich your everyday experiences as well as your experience of art, both great and small.

World renowned wine expert Steven Spurrier talks about how to analyze wine color. Or analyse wine colour if your English.