Yes is welcoming. Yes is affirming. In a negotiation, yes is the thing we strive to get to. In the Wine Corner, we like saying and hearing yes, but sometimes a good forthright no is the right tool for the job — especially when the task involves sorting out fact from fiction in wine, where a disturbing amount of sloppy, misleading, downright erroneous talk is pervasive.
We can’t hope to deal with the whole sordid mess in this small space, but we’ll have a go at putting the kibosh on at least a few stubborn fallacies. Bear with us while we pop some bibulous balloons.
Older vines make better wine, right? It depends what you mean by better. Younger vines have less well-developed root systems and, in general, produce fruit that is less rich in phenolic compounds (the stuff that makes wine winey). But this really only says that a young vine will make a different wine than an older counterpart. It’s up to you to decide which version you prefer. It’s also often the case that winemakers who have seriously old vines will often reserve that fruit for their prestige cuvées, which generally receive both more attention in the processing and an extended maturation, including some time in new or newish oak barrels to add drama. By the way, the 1973 Stag’s Leap Cabernet that bested Château Mouton Rothschild and Château Haut Brion in the famous Judgment of Paris tasting in 1976 (and put California wine on the map) was made from vines scarcely three years old.
Appellation-designated wines (like Côtes du Rhone or Chianti Classico) are always a step up from simple table wine, right? It ain’t necessarily so. While appellation rules enforce standards of practice and impose an approved, consensus style, these days a surprising number of conscientious winemakers are opting out of the system in order to make high quality wines with a freer hand than the rules allow, using, for example, non-authorized grape varieties. This kind of wine can be as good, or even surpass, more conformist types.
The minerally character some wines display derives from soils, right? Careful here. Wine is not like mineral water which absorbs and holds in solution an array of inorganic compounds soaked up in long subterranean sojourns. It’s these solids that give mineral water its characteristic briny, bitter, alkaline character, but this process doesn’t describe the interaction of geologic minerals with vines or their fruit. Flint present in soil cannot translate into “flinty” flavors in wine, in part because of the brute fact that minerals present in wine exist in almost undetectable concentrations and, in any case, have neither scent nor flavor to contribute.
Your correspondent is partial to the view that minerality as a term current among wine enthusiasts is really just a way to describe a spectrum of flavors generated by fermentation that don’t read as fruity or leafy or herbal or spicy, but which we find challenging to put a name to. As always, when facts are in short supply, the imagination steps in.
Organic wines are sulfite-free, right? Sorry, Charlie. Sulfites are a natural product of fermentation and so will always be present in wine in some measure. The question is how much (if any) is intentionally added in the winemaking process. In the U.S., wine labelled organic can contain no more than 10 milligrams per liter, however derived. In the EU, the standard is much less stringent. SO2 is an extremely effective anti-oxidant and anti-bacterial/anti-fungal agent and has been resorted to since ancient times. Commonly abused, it is nonetheless unlikely to be the source of those pesky headaches.
The best wine is made with the ripest grapes, right? Tricky, because “ripe” is an elusive descriptor. In the process we call ripening, wine grapes undergo significant changes to their physiology and chemistry, most obviously losing acid and gaining sugar. These changes also affect sensory character along a kind of arc. In red wine, the earlier stages of ripeness produce flavors in the currant and cranberry neighborhood, while later stages develop plum, blackberry and eventually fig and date notes. Ripeness advances at different rates, depending on the atmospheric and geographic conditions present and some allowance for varietal variation. Also, each winemaker will have a bespoke notion of the ripeness likely to achieve the aimed-for style. Complicated? You bet.
The Wine Corner guy is always right, right? If only it were so, Dear Reader.