Wine Tasting Terms 1

1. Extraction and skins contact

Both red and white wines can derive richness, grip, flavour and weight during their making by experiencing a period of contact between the juice or must with grape skins prior to or during fermentation. Non-aromatic white varieties such as chardonnay and semillon may benefit from short periods of such contact prior to and throughout the early phases of fermentation as a means of acquiring additional texture and firmness in the middle palate. Red wines, which extract their colour and phenolic backbone through skin contact throughout much or all of fermentation, depend on the process, regulated by the winemaker through choice of the fermenter used and the management technique applied to keep the ‘cap’ of skins fully submerged, itself pushed upwards by the generation of carbon dioxide gas throughout the fermentation.

2. Development

Wine only ceases to evolve once matured well and truly past its prime. We cellar wines not to expect them to accumulate more of the attractive flavours we might admire in their youth, but for them to acquire new and complex flavours and characters, each the result of intricate molecular transformations, most of which are totally foreign to their taste and feel when young. This is the development of wine, easily seen when young floral and citrus rieslings become honeyed and toasty, or when aggressive young blackcurrant cabernet acquires a soft, luxuriant mouthfeel and the flavours of violets, cedar and cigarboxes.


3. Earthy

As a general rule, one does not taste the earth in which a particular vine was grown, although it is possible to argue than some soils, such as the chalk of Chablis or the ferrous loams of central Victoria impart closely associated characters and flavours into their wines. Most frequently those characters described as ‘earthy’ are a combination of reduced sulphur initially from H2S or hydrogen sulphide, which does not have to be present in particularly high amounts and flavours that result from the association between certain grape varieties and their terroir, or soil-climate-aspect relationship. An ‘earthy’ wine need be anything but a faulty or poor wine. Ultimately it becomes a question of a whether the wine has enough other flavours and qualities not to let its earthiness dominate it entirely and, b how closely the wine corresponds to accepted international interpretations of style.


4. Green

Wines described as ‘green’ are generally thin on the palate and display a flavour profile excessively tending towards the herbaceous and the vegetative rather than the fruity. Under-ripe grapes have higher than desirable levels of malic acid, the acid found in green apples, a character often witnessed in wines made from them. Ripeness has much to do with fruit exposure in the vine canopy, and we observe that in addition to retarding ripening, excessively shaded grapes can acquire high levels of certain pungent molecules which impart other intensely herbaceous characters to finished wines.

5. Sappy

Although the term ‘sappy’ can refer to a fresh, light wine that perhaps lacks impact in the middle palate, it most often refers to an undesirable oak-derived character. Certain American cooperages accelerate the drying process of their oak staves by drying them in kilns, rather than by leaving them stacked outside for several years, for the natural wood moisture remaining in the oak to leach to its surface and evaporate away. The risk with kiln drying is that the process may be rapid, and that barrels are made from still-sappy oak, a character than can be imparted into wine fermented or matured within.

6. Tight

A wine does not have to be overpowering in its richness and body to be of high quality. Certain wines, frequently from cooler climates, can combine a full length of flavour with delicate mouthfeel and a complex, yet restrained flavour profile. Time may be required for these wines to develop more volume of flavour, if indeed they ever will, for even at maturity they can remain delicate and supple. Some such wines can be described as ‘tight’ or ‘lean’. This is not to be confused with ‘tightly-knit’, which regardless of a wine’s depth of flavour or body refers to the precisely interwoven marriage of fruit with other qualities, such as autolysed yeast character or oak.


7. Complex

Complex wines are those which display a wide spectrum of flavours, some perhaps identifiable, others not. Certain varieties, such as riesling, do not require oak, bottle maturation or other means of inputting flavours and textures to achieve a high degree of complexity. Other varieties, such as chardonnay and semillon, most certainly do.

8. Bottle Stink

Most bottles of red wine, plus some whites, require a period of ‘breathing’ immediately after opening, during which certain pungent and ‘off’ smells are able to evaporate out of the wine, while the wine simultaneously receives the benefit of a short spell of oxidation. The pungent odours, known as ‘bottle stink’, are generally related to reduced sulphur, although not all reduced sulphur odours are able to vacate the wine in this fashion.

9. Supple

Suppleness in a wine is a word to describe an elegant, undemanding mouthfeel, with full length, smoothness and approachability. Supple wines generally have low or well-integrated levels of tannin and other phenolics and highlight their fruit.

10. Vinous

Vinosity is a wine’s wine-like property, suggestive of grape-derived flavours against being dominated by excessive oak, for example and the presence of alcoholic strength.

11. Hotness

Some wines exhibit intense ‘stewed’ or ‘baked’ fruit characters, often resulting from hot seasons or short, hot fermentations. Typical examples are stewed plums or blackcurrants, or other berry fruits. Another ‘hot’ wine character is the warm, spirity mouthfeel that may be experienced when tasting a wine with an alcoholic strength above 13 by volume.

12. Blousy

Certain wines, most commonly from the warmer areas, combine the duals features of an excessively broad, flabby palate with a lack of acidity. The result is a wine apparently without direction or ending, whose problem will generally only magnify with further maturation. Traminers and over-oaked chardonnays tend to make the most obvious examples. Please login to post comment