I’m often asked “What makes a wine good?” It’s an excellent question, so let’s address it. What does make a wine “good”? When I taste wines the first thing I look for is balance, so let’s discuss what exactly it is that should be in balance. White wines have alcohol, acidity and fruit and/or sweetness as their main characteristics, and all three should be there in your glass, and in balanced amounts. A wine with too much alcohol will feel hot on your tongue, as if someone added some vodka to the wine. Acidity in wine comes mainly from citric, tartaric, and malic acids, all of which are natural components of grape juice. Lactic acid is found in wine when the winemaker allows a second fermentation, called malolactic fermentation to change the malic acid (from the Latin “malo”, meaning apple, and giving wine a green apple note) into lactic acid (found in dairy products and having a smoother, softer feel in the mouth), which lowers the overall Ph of the wine. Too much acidity will pucker your mouth, like sucking on a lemon. Too little and the wine will taste flat and flabby, without tone. Last week we talked about dry wines and sweet wines, and mentioned fruitiness, which is not dependent on sugar. This is the third characteristic to look for in white wines: fruit and/or sugar. This is where the aromas and flavors come in. Not enough, and it’s more like drinking water than a glass of wine. Too much, and it’s like fruit punch, or like an over sweetened soft drink with alcohol added. It’s a bit like the story of Goldilocks, looking for everything not too small, not too big, just right: all three of these aspects need to be present in quantities sufficient to balance off the other two, but not so much as to dominate the others. The reason a great sweet wine such as a First Growth Sauternes tastes so good is that there is plenty of acidity to balance the sweetness. Red wines, also, have alcohol as one of their main components, but now tannins are important players. Tannins, found in the stems, seeds and skins of grapes, are natural preservatives. The process of turning animal skins into leather is called tanning because it uses tannic acid to remove the blood and fats from the hide. Tannins, which we feel as having a drying effect on the sides of the tongue, are what makes red wine a better match with red meat. The presence of tannins is the main reason that red wines tend to age better than white wines. Acidity also is an important factor in the balance of red wines. Too little and the wine will lack “nerve” and seem flabby. Too much and the wine will be unpleasantly tart. Much has been made about the use of oak barrels in wine making, and we’ll give that a column in the near future, but let’s touch on the subject for a moment now. Tannins and lignins are also present in oak barrels, and many of the world’s finest red wines, meant for years of cellaring before they are ready to be drunk, spend some time in new oak. The problem with many wine makers, though, is that they think wine drinkers will confuse the taste of oak with quality, and sadly many have. New barrels cost $600 to $700 each, so some wine makers flavor their wines by soaking oak chips in the wine. When I’m tasting a wine and I smell and taste oak, I ask myself if the wine spent time maturing in oak because it will be aged or simply to add oak flavor. I’m not a fan of overly oaked wine. I want my wines to also show complexity: I want more than one aroma or one flavor to show. I want a sense of the unique place where these grapes were grown (the French call this a sense of “terroir”). I want finish: the taste of the wine should linger in the mouth after the wine has been swallowed. I want my wine to either make me smile the way a simple country wine can, or to make me think, the way a great wine demands. If I only want to quench my thirst I’ll drink beer. I want wine made by a wine maker who doesn’t demand attention: wine is meant to be enjoyed with food, and even the greatest of wines tastes best with a meal. Too many wine makers are making unbalanced monster wines, wines that taste as if the grapes were on steroids. They’re too “big”, too high in alcohol. Sadly, these are the wines that many “critics” praise with high numbers. Too few wine writers and “critics” seem to forget about price when they taste. Just because they get to taste these wines for free doesn’t change the fact that that someone will be asked to pay for them when they are put on sale! I always think of price when I taste, and value is the other component that must be in balance for me to consider the wine “good”. There are plenty of wines on the market that sell for $24 that taste like $12 bottles. It’s the $12 wines that taste like $24 that I’m after, and I often manage to find. It takes work, and a willingness to forget about going along with the crowd. (When you buy a wine that spends millions for ads, YOU are paying for those ads.) I spend time looking for wines that are balanced in all of these areas, and I love doing it. Maybe it’s my Libra nature or maybe I simply love wine and a good value! I always love to hear my customers tell me how much they enjoy the wines I pick out for Red White & Bubbly. They taste so good, they went so well with dinner, and they taste like I spent more than I did.
