Write a newspaper wine column as your correspondent did for years, and you quickly learn that to get the work done you have to settle into a routine. For me, step one was generating an idea — a single question, issue, or problem that could be clearly stated at the outset, wrangled with for a few paragraphs, then brought to a more or less satisfying conclusion by the time I hit the word count.
It’s not as easy as it sounds, because while there was no shortage of topics that interested me, how was I to know what readers had on their minds that week? I could only guess, and hope that by the end of the piece readers are thinking something like “Yes, I always wondered about that,” even if they really never did.
Operating in a retail environment, as I do now in the FK Wine Corner, eliminates this problem. Since my job is essentially to meet and chat with clientèle and answer their questions about wine, I have a pretty good idea of what’s on their minds because … they tell me. What follows are the five questions I field most often, and how I respond to them.
Q. Why does one wine cost more than another?
A. Wine pricing seems arbitrary because it can be difficult without a lot of experience to learn from a label alone what distinguishes one bottle, in quality terms, from another. As with many other products, a winemaker receives only a fraction of the shelf price. There are sometimes more intermediaries involved than you might imagine. Up to something like $50 or $60 retail per bottle (there’s no hard and fast rule about this and certain extremely low-yield, labor-intensive specialty wines don’t qualify for this rough bracketing), there’s a pretty direct correlation between the costs of production and the shelf price.
After that, it becomes more a matter of supply and demand driven by trends, fashion, and reputation. Ultimately, you, the consumer, are the judge of whether you got good value. If it’s any comfort, the small-scale producers we favor aren’t getting rich making wine. With many of them, wine is just one of the things they produce in a mixed farming operation.
Q. Of the wines you’re suggesting, which is the best?
A. Based on what I’ve been able to learn from chatting with you and operating within the price constraints you’ve described, the wines I suggest for you should all work fine. They’re all a little different, of course, and you’ll have your preferences, but the differences aren’t the kind that make one superior to another.
At a certain point, wines are like colors: it isn’t meaningful to talk about one color being better than another, but one hue may end up being more appropriate for the situation. Your choice will likely be based on circumstantial factors, such as room size, what the space is used for and how much light it gets. In a similar way it’s very often environmental factors (food, company, weather, mood, time of day), rather than something inherent in the wine, that leaves you thrilled or disappointed.
Q. Is this wine dry?
A. Dryness in wine has two meanings, one objective and one subjective. If the fermenting yeasts are allowed to do their job completely, they will convert close to 100% of the grape sugars in the vat to alcohol. A wine with very low levels of grape sugars remaining in it post-fermentation (referred to as residual sugar) is said to be dry. It’s objective because the exact sugar content is something that can be determined by analysis — there’s a number to point to, usually presented as grams of sugar per liter. It’s never zero.
The concentration at which sugar becomes detectable by the human palate is thought to be something above 4 grams per liter — though some other factors are in play. Wine in which you barely perceive any sweetness is also said to be dry, irrespective of its analyzable sugar content. This second measure of sweetness is quite subjective and readily influenced by acidity levels and temperature.
Something like sweetness may be experienced in wine even when very little sugar is present if it is perceived as being very fruity. In these cases, the term dry is used to mean not (or at least less) fruity. Because, as a descriptor, dry is inherently ambiguous in this way, I prefer to use it only to mean very low analyzable residual sugar in the wine. I might use ‘savory’ to describe a wine in which fruity aspects are less dominant.
Q. What does this wine taste like?
A. The most asked question and the hardest one of all to answer. Wine is innately complex and the impressions it makes are notoriously both variable and subjective. Two reference points are available: (a) the tastes and smells of other things and (b) other wines. The most useful by far is the latter. Is there a wine you had recently that you can use as a benchmark? What were were the qualities in that wine you particularly favored or disliked? The more information you can provide, the more likely I’ll understand what you’re looking for.
Q. Sulfites give me headaches. Do you have wines that are sulfite-free?
A. Sulfur has historically played an important role in winemaking, as an anti-bacterial and anti-oxidation agent. Some sulfur compounds are naturally-occurring and present to some degree in all wine, apart from added S02. The latest science suggests that, in most cases, sulfites are not responsible for headaches. We know this because since white wines are more susceptible than red wines to the things sulfur is intended to protect against (spoilage of various kinds; loss of fresh fruit flavors and aromas) they are routinely more heavily dosed than red wines. In spite of this, most people who complain of headaches say they occur after drinking red wine, but not after white. What’s going on?
Red wines have a more complicated chemistry than whites. In fact, the structure of red wine is so chemically complex that scientists have not yet exhaustively teased out every component. Any one or a combination of these many compounds could be causing trouble, and it may have nothing to do with sulfites. Even if it turns out that you are one of the few people acutely sensitive to sulfites, a no-added sulfites wine may not solve your problem, since, as we’ve noted, sulfites are a natural product of fermentation and no wine can be 100% sulfite-free.
We find that some percentage of people with a sensitivity to red wine discover they tolerate lighter-bodied reds well — for the simple reason that these have lower overall concentrations of the stuff that makes red wine red, and so may deliver lower and more tolerable levels of whatever’s been bothering you.
Your glass of Q&A still half full? See us in the Wine Corner for a top up …