Chatting with a guest and asked to describe a red wine, I might use words such as extraction, density, or concentration, only to be met by a blank stare. Such words seem plain enough, but somehow when the subject is wine they sow confusion rather than clarity. My guess, reinforced by experience, is that people assume that when applied to wine these mundane terms take on arcane, specialist meanings — a little like a secret handshake — when, in fact, they mean pretty much here what they would in any other context.
In such cases, I often turn the conversation in the direction of a cup of tea. Not as in ‘let’s have a cup of tea and talk it over, shall we,’ but as a way of explaining how wine can have (or lack) things like weight, density, and concentration, understood in the most ordinary meaning of the words. Tea and wine turn out to have much in common.
Brewing tea is a simple process that is nonetheless capable of an almost infinite number of permutations and therefore of an equally hyperbolic number of variations in the cup. Some of these are beyond the control of the person making the tea — the specific quality of the leaf being the most notable — but two are entirely within our power: the ratio of tea to water and how long it will macerate or steep. Too few leaves or too short a steep will make a weakish cup; low in aroma, flavor, and texture.
By contrast, too much tea or too long an infusion can produce an overpowering brew. In modest doses, tannin adds a pleasing note of bitterness and grip to the cup, but in excess can be distinctly disagreeable. It’s an appropriate amount of tea steeped in an appropriate amount of hot water for an appropriate amount of time that makes the perfect cup.
Like tea, wine has a complex chemistry. Like tea, red wine is an infusion, wherein the compounds responsible for color, aroma, and texture that are resident mainly in the skins of grapes are released into solution. In the case of red wine, the infusion medium isn’t hot water, but the juices liberated from grapes as they are crushed and degraded in fermentation. Alcohol (generated as yeasts consume grape sugars) acts as an agent of the transition.
When we talk about body, concentration, density, or weight in wine or tea, we’re really talking about (a) how much of these pigment and flavor compounds were present in the original material and (b) how much of what was present was extracted in the winemaking or brewing process.
Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Syrah all have natively high levels of the things that make red wine red (chemists call them phenols) and so have more to give than Pinot Noir, or Schiava Nera, for example. In the same way, fully-oxidized black teas (like the one I’m sipping as I write this) have more to give than white or green teas.
No matter what raw materials she may be working with, every winemaker fully controls the degree of extraction by determining how long the process of infusion will go on. In this respect, doing more or less what you or I would in a parallel tea-making situation: watching both the clock and the color to judge when to pull the sachet or pour the water off the leaves. With this in mind, you can think of a glass of rosé as a light cup of tea, and vice versa.
Ideas about how much extraction is proper for a pleasing, satisfying red wine vary with individual winemakers, with critics, with consumers, and with the times. Wine is subject to trends in taste, too, and your correspondent has watched the pendulum swing rather wildly over fifty years of wine drinking. It may seem ironic that just as climate change is giving us riper grapes, the wine hipperatti are opting for a lighter, fresher, less alcoholic style. But so it is.
Speaking for myself, I can’t say I find wine at the far end of the extraction spectrum much more appealing than a pot of tea I’ve got going, forgotten about, and returned to find brutally over-steeped. But it’s clearly a matter of taste and, to some degree, context: the season, the weather, what’s for lunch or supper.
That’s why when we meet in the Wine Corner and try to help you find a just-right wine for the occasion, we may well start out talking about extraction, density, and concentration — and end up with tea for two.