Wine Words:

What to Say About Wine

From an exchange between vineyard technical crews several years ago (all names have been changed):

Question: “Can you save a small sample for me to take to George? The owner of the vineyard also has horses and has been "disposing" of the horse manure over several years. George does not want the manure in the vineyard, but his hands have been tied. This just might help him show the owner that the current practice is probably lowering the value of his property.”

Answer: “…I picked up samples [today]… The one I was most curious about has been Adelle’s [which is] right on [Highway] 101. I was looking for exhaust fumes in it. I did not smell the fumes.

Bonnie smelled it not knowing what it was. She grew up with horses. She described horse shit and alfalfa hay. Guess what they composted with between the rows…”

Terroir (dirt, sort of)

Not every single aroma in the wine comes from grapes or handling. The French have known this all along. They call it “terroir” which is usually translated into English as “land.” But land is only part of vineyard terroir.

Americans don’t have a word like this in English because we don’t think the same way. To understand vineyard terroir you have to think about how things are related to each other, not just what they are. American wine making tends to be reductive, seeking to control the smallest elements we can identify and influence, for instance molecules, yeast, or clones.

In general, we don’t think about the relationship between things that influence the wine like the vintner’s personality, the things growing around the vineyard, or driving through the vineyard. Or, the afternoon wind in Monterrey which radically changes the temperature of the vines. But, terroir is there whether you think about it or not.

In French winemaking “terroir” means everything that influences a particular vineyard’s wines and the relationships among them. That includes climate, rivers, farming practices, the vines’ habitat and (see quote above) horse shit and car exhaust fumes. It even includes roses and eucalyptus trees growing beside the vineyard.

Terroir also means all the influences of humans on the wine: the style and personality of the owner/winemakers, their personal values, choices about which clones to use, and how long to ferment and what to ferment it in.

It’s a much more encompassing and fluid word than anything we say here since even the age and emotional life of the vintner are terroir. And, of course, lot’s of people means lots of different things when they say it, but what they are looking for is “what makes this particular wine unique?”

Vraison (Changing Color)

The berry growth and ripening follows a double sigmoid growth curve. You knew that didn’t you? It just means the berries develop slowly for a while, then very rapidly, and finally slowly again—if you graph it the shape you see is that of an “S,” more or less.

As berries develop on the vine, they go through different stages that affect the finished wine. The most critical time in the development of specific outside aromas in a given vineyard seems to be a two week period when the berries’ development shift from growing to ripening (vraison). Acid (malic) goes down and sugar goes up.

It’s then that the growing grapes are most likely to pick up exhaust fumes, aromas from nearby plants and trees, and human interventions like horse or chicken manure. All that absorption from everything around it makes for unique wines both with good qualities (eucalyptus) and bad (horse manure).

This soaking up of everything around them is only one of the many things vines have in common with humans. The human influence can sometimes overwhelm the wine—big forest fires in Napa Valley for instance which leaves a nasty smoky-burnt taste in the wine. Grafting grapes onto the wrong clone to make more money. Growing the grapes in the wrong place.

In passing these are almost always aromas that don’t show up on the wine aroma wheels because so few people seem to know about them or why they are there. But, now you do.

WINE WORDS ™

Putting words to wine is critical and anybody can do it if they want to. Here are a few more smells and where they come from:

Red wines aged in oak barrels

Oak: Fresh cut (or a wooden pencil for people like me who spent large amounts of time chewing on them in grade school). When you get better you can identify whether it’s American oak or French oak or occasionally in some cases, even the difference in forests.

Cigar box. I know this is harder to find today but if you smell it once you will never forget it. This is one of my favorite smells in older French Bordeaux. It is different than cigars which is a smell that show up in wine, too, but cigar box is classic French red wine aroma. It’s a product of the soil in Bordeaux but I’ve come across it in a handful of California cabernets which would indicate other parts of terroir are involved too.

Chocolate. This one I know you can find. Chocolate comes from aging the wine in the barrels longer. Of course, milk chocolate is different than dark chocolate, but you can worry about that later. Start with what you like because that will guide you to the wines you will like. If you don’t like dark chocolate it stands to reason that you won’t like a wine that smells like dark chocolate.

Sweet dessert wines

Honey: Some of the greatest dessert wines in the world are from the Sauterne area South of the Garonne River in France. The same honey smell can occur in German wines too, especially from the Rhine River, when the grapes have been left on the vine long after normal harvest. When I first learned to taste wines back in Houston, Texas the only thing I could really taste was alcohol and sugar. The first wine I could taste anything else in was Chateau D’Yquem from Sauterne.

Figs: The smell of figs is unique and it will show up in sweet dessert wines too, often in California or American dessert wines. Buy some figs, or a fig for that matter, and cut in open and that is the smell I’m talking about. Note: dried figs is a different smell.

Nuts: There are a lot of nuts in the world. Everything from common Groundnuts (peanuts) to exotic Macadamia and Pistachios. OK, so peanuts are actually a legume but you get the idea. All of that is possible, but the kind of nuttiness I’m talking about here is more like Walnuts (fresh). Pick a couple of types and notice what you notice when you bite into them or break them open.

So, there you go. Start anywhere. Start where you are. What’s around you right now. And begin to develop your skill to recognize and name smells when you don’t have the visual cues to tell you what they are. You can wear a blindfold or you can just shut your eyes and have someone else hold them under your nose.