El Vino

By Iani deKock

How often have we found ourselves in front of endless rows of bottles and labels of vino, clutching our wallets and wondering just which bottle will impress the girl/boy/boss/parents-in-law without costing significantly more than a six-pack? According to wine marketing research, wine consumers call on certain quality indicators before deciding to place that one fateful bottle of fermented grape juice into their shopping trolley.

After considering our price range, we usually tend to buy the same trialed and tested, trusted brand.  But we may feel experimental and go for something French instead of the usual old plonk.  Our next fact to ponder tends to be our preferred varietals, be it red or white.  There are literally 100’s of varietals to choose from, although supermarket rows, such as the one we find ourselves in front of, tend to stock only a few. The final quality indicator we will discuss, and by far the most frequently used is: …the label.  Yes!  The basis of most wine consumers’ decisions, when they are baffled by mad ramblings of estate, country of origin and unpronounceable varietal names, is simply whether they like the picture on the label or not.  This is a fact consciously exploited by wine marketers and thus by no means an indicator of whether the contents in the bottle come straight from Bacchus or Hades.

So what stands us to do?  Which superhero can we call to save us in these dry times?  Now there has never been a wine super villain, thus never necessitating a wine superhero, and wine guru Robert Parker screens his calls. Thus the Voice has selflessly stepped up to the challenge to quaff our way through 9 bottles of wines of varying varieties, countries-of-origin and label appeal, in around the NT300 range.

Of course, there is a difference between tasting and merely drinking wine.  Tasting wine is an interpretative art.  You become a CS Investigator, taking your time to establish which grape you have in your glass, what happened to it and where it comes from.  While wine taste is relative and personal, one can generally assume that a wine that tells you a lot and communicates will be better appreciated than a shy wine with no story. 

We will need to collect as much information about what’s in a glass as we can. When interpreting a wine, there are 3 general areas of focus: appearance, nose and palate.  When judging for appearance, you pour a little wine in your glass and tilt it at a 45-degree angle against a white background.  This enables you to see if there is anything floating in it, any residue and whether it is hazy or clear.  Next, you look at the color. The color can tell you whether it is sweet, which variety of grape it is, as well as the age of a wine if it differs obviously from the centre of your glass towards the edges.  Color is rated out of a 3 and unless it has any obvious flaws, usually gets full marks.

The Nose refers to the smell of the wine and tells the investigator two important things: which varietal it is, or its aroma, also referred to as its bouquet, and how it was handled it in the cellar.  The bouquet reveals many cellaring processes, such as maturation in oak barrels obvious as vanilla, caramel or toasty whiffs.  The aromas are usually volatile fruit acids which evaporate and are similar to different fruit acids.  Thus one may smell green or red apples, berries, citrus, etc.  Then there are the more interesting flavors, like flowers and all sorts of minerals, herbs and spices, leather, shoe polish, mushrooms, dust, wet hay, and even sweaty armpits and cat urine.  These aren’t artificial additives, but actual characteristics of the particular grape, revealing their different climates and growing conditions. The aroma of a specific grape varietal can be quite distinct, telling you not only which varietal it is, but which country, area and even estate it comes from.  A good sommelier, or ‘smellier’ as one of our tasters called them, needs only to sniff the cork to deduce from its tangerine, lime and pineapple nose that it is an unwooded, Southern Hemisphere Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand, the Marlborough district and probably the Cloudy Bay 2006 .  Elementary!

Since there are 100 vinous whiffs, listing them would be an impossibility.  It’ll be very helpful to have a nose indicator, which you should be able to find online or in good book. But after sniffing enough Sauvignon Blancs, the aromas will be jumping at you out of the glass like lovers reunited at an airport.  The nose is rated out of 7, 7 being an exceptional wine with complex layers of smells.  An average wine should give you at least one or two good aromas and should rate about 3.  Unless there are obvious flaws, identifiable as wet cardboard or nail varnish smells, a wine shouldn’t be rated lower than average.    

The last area of investigation for our wine taster is the palate, or taste. Firstly, we’ll look at sweetness (residual sugar), tasted on the tip of your tongue.  Wines with little or no sugar are classified as dry, followed by off-dry, semi-sweet and sweet wines.  The latter are also known as desert wines and include Sherries, Ports, and straw wines. 

Next off, we will focus on the flavors and tastes of the palate.  Usually, the fruits and flavors found on the nose (the good ones!  Thankfully sweaty armpits and the like purely put in olfactory appearances) should make their way to the palate, and maybe also introduce a few new friends. 

Next up, we focus on the natural preservatives found in wine: acidity and tannins.  The acidity is tasted on the sides of your tongue and makes your mouth water.  Too little acidity leaves a wine flat and flabby and too much acidity results in a sour or tart wine.  Get it just right and acidity brings life and zest into a wine.  Drool!  Tannins come from the skin of the grape, as well as the oak barrels used for maturation.  They are what make wines red, thus unwooded white wines effectively have no tannins.  Tannins are usually tasted at the back of the tongue or the by rubbing your tongue over your teeth.  It causes the mouth-puckering sensation in a wine.  The reader needs only drink a cold cup of strong black tea to experience tannins full-on.  

The balance of the wine is the degree to which the flavors, acidity and tannins compliment or overshadow each other.  This might reveal that a wine appearing tart may be lacking in sufficient fruits or tannins.  Often the case with premium red wines, the tannins on young wines are overly very strong.  This requires you to lay the bottle down on its side and display some patience for a few years, while the tannins react to oxygen and soften.  This results in some unique, yummy flavors well worth the wait. 

Lastly, we judge the body of the wine (whether it is a light-, medium-, or full bodied) and its finish.  Take a sip, swallow and sit back enjoying the flavor.  The longer the taste of the wine stays in your mouth, the higher quality wine you are savoring. 

The wine investigator now uses the information collected to try and establish which variety is being dealt with and where it comes from.  Wines of Origin refers to the country, district and more specifically, the estate the grapes used, came from.  Grapes, more than any other fruit, react uniquely to their specific climate and topography and the same grape tastes very different from one estate to the next, between districts, and countries.  We will broadly distinguish between climates and styles. Warm climate grapes tend to ripen quickly, have higher sugars and lower acidity.  The resultant wines are thus higher in alcohol and more fruit-driven as opposed to the juicy, taut, mineral and earthy wines resulting from slow ripening cold climate grapes. However, with good winemaking techniques, warm climate grapes can be molded to display characteristics akin to colder climate wines. These characteristics can be directly relabeled under style. 

We broadly differentiate between Old World and New World styles, the first being Europe and the latter, the rest of the colonized world.  European climates and styles, also referred to as classical styles, reflect the cold climate characteristics and tend to be more wooded, serious wines requiring years of maturation in the bottle to be enjoyed 10+ years after bottling.  New World styles are made to be fruit-driven and almost immediately enjoyable. Both have their vices. 

Now, after careful sniffing, gargling, and maybe some spitting, the taster is ready to decide how to interpret and rate their personal vinous experience.  The palate is rated out of 10, 5 being average and 9 exceptional. The appearance, nose and palate are thus combined to give a rating out of 20.

Armed with the tools and the will, all we needed were some wines to get better acquainted with.  Our tasting panel consisted of wine lovers ranging in their abilities and expertise, thus being a realistic representation of the readers of this article. We then selected 9 wines from Geante hypermarket (Wen Hsin Rd and TaichungGang Rd intersection), which stocks a fine range of red wines from the far corners of the world, but a tragically limited selection of Whites. The red wines were set out to breathe and served at room temperature of about 20 degrees, even though 17 degrees is the universal standard. The white wines were chilled. But enough from me:  in vino veritas!

Continue for the Wine Results