The signature on a document, work of art, or other created thing is a mark of origination: a sign that associates the object in some definitive way with those responsible for its content, or, more fundamentally, its existence. Although it’s common for a signature to take the form of a handwritten name, there are many other possibilities.
In the pre-modern world, kings kept a great seal under close guard. Pressing it into warm wax reproduced its unique likeness and provided proof of the royal origin of a document. Today, watermarks, fingerprints, blockchain technology, iris-scans and DNA analysis all serve as signatures of a sort, helping to establish identity, ownership and authenticity.
In the world of wine, signatures have an outsized importance, since, for better or worse, so much of what is considered wine expertise — what used to be, and in some quarters still is, called connoisseurship — is wrapped up with identification and classification. To accomplish this, where the provenance of a wine is unknown (or concealed, as in a blind tasting), experienced tasters use a combination of sensory clues that serve as signatures to find their way. At least three of these are inscribed by nature and can be neatly organized into a wine’s what, where and when.
Each individual grape variety has a unique physiognomy and chemical makeup that determines what flavors, aromas, and textures are possible in the wine made from it. Some varieties are more readily identifiable by tasting than others, because they’re more common or because they possess some hard-to-miss characteristic. Others prove less legible because they lack these features. You can think of varietal character as wine’s what signature.
But it’s been known since ancient times that the same grape variety grown in different places often shows markedly different character. Chardonnay from California’s warm, sunny spaces is generally easily distinguished from Chardonnay originating under the cool, overcast skies of Chablis in northeast France. Soils, including both their organic and inorganic components, also play a key role; as do native yeast populations, site orientation and elevation. The place where fruit is sourced marks wine with a where signature.
Climate, it’s said, is what you expect, while weather is what you get. Since no one growing season is identical to another, the very same wines from the very same places will naturally vary from year to year — sometimes dramatically. Vintage variation can be thought of as wine’s when signature.
But we’re not done yet. Since wine has never been known to make itself, it must necessarily bear the traces of human activity, attributable to the specific ensemble of craft processes in the vineyard and cellar that brought it about. When these techniques are generic, we can refer to them as wine’s how signature. But there also exists a modest number of winemakers known to operate in such an idiosyncratic way that every wine they produce — from whatever material and in whatever place — can be thought of as bearing a distinctive, personal stamp: and thus a who signature.
In this sense, any wine of quality has something important in common with our Declaration of Independence: a multiplicity of signatories, some of whose penmanship is more legible than others.