Wine Fruit and Flavour

Although it is aspect of structure, fruit is the point at which we leave structure and start talking about flavour. The acid, oak alcohol and tannin in a wine are the framework within which we get on with checking out the lovely array of flavours in wine. It is a remarkable aspect of the humble yet mighty grape that it produces a drink that rarely smells of grapes; rather it can produce all sorts of fruit flavours. It’s like squeezing apples and getting umbongo (anyone remember that?). Now wine contains all sorts of other flavours from petrol to honey and we’ll get on to that but one of the building blocks is fruit. Basically red wine produces the gamut of red fruit flavours from light red like strawberries to dark red like blackcurrants. White wine is generally less fruit driven but it does produce citrus flavours – lemons, limes, mangoes, as well as apples and lychees (ridiculous isn’t it but it is true of Riesling)

There are other flavours beyond fruit in wine, an almost endless supply if you care to look for them, but lets start by breaking it down into big chunks and then start breaking those down into littler chunks. Two more important flavour types are minerality and flora (that’s flowers and rocks to the rest of us). Wood is another bunch of flavours that can be teased out of wine. The better you get at tasting the more flavours you will begin to detect – this is the domain of the ‘palate’.

The Wine Palate

Your palate is basically your ability to smell and taste – everybody has one. However, as palate can be ‘educated’ which basically means, after you have drunk a lot of wine, your nose and throat get to recognise different types. Lets break it down into smell and taste – taste is limited, it can only really identify four or five basic tastes – sweet, sour, salt, bitterness and something else which I cant remember but is basically funny Japanese term for the taste of monosodium glutamate ( though I suspect they made it up to confuse westerners). By contrast smell is amazing – your olifactory nerves can process about 3000 different things from gaspaccio soup to the ionising of air before a thunderstorm. If your looking for an analogy smell is like a woman and taste is like a man. One is complex and tricky, the other straight forward but rather simple.

Taste and smell are not objective things – they are completely personal experiences. This is not simply a question of different people liking different things but something quite fundamental about the nature of sensory experiences. After all, how do you know that strawberries taste the same to everyone else as they do to you? When you as a kid first smelt a strawberry a little neuron fired in your brain which connected that smell with the image of a small red fruit and the word strawberry. Every time you’ve eaten a strawberry since that little neuron has fired again and you’ve gone ‘oh a strawberry how nice’ before drinking lots of champagne and forgetting which way up your head is. It’s a learned association – all taste really is acquired taste and the more you work at it the better you get. If you really want to be able to identify the famous blackcurrantyness of good Pauillac go bury your nose in some blackcurrants, take a good big sniff and work out what they really smell like – teach your brain. The same goes for butter in classic chardonnay, the rubberyness in pinotage, the tar in Aussie Shiraz etc etc.

Once you’ve done all that you will be in a much better position to identify all the smells in wine. You highly tutored brain will start off being able to identify the basic smells of wine (eg fruit, minerality, wood flavours etc) but will soon be a whiz at distinguishing the finer gradation of flavour in a good wine – eg butter from cream, honey from wax. You will soon be able to irritate you friends when drinking wine together by saying “actually John I think you’ll find those are loganberries not blackberries’.

The other point about all this taste ands smell malarkey is that because it is all acquired there are actually no objective rules in wine tasting. What you bring to any glass of wine is you unique experience of previous smells and tastes which have informed and conditioned your brain in a unique way. Therefore there are NO RIGHT OR WRONG ANSWERS only your honestly given impressions of what you can smell. After all you see things that are green and I see things that are green but we have no idea of telling if what I see as green is anything like what you see. You brain associates certain smells with certain things as does my brain. But they don’t necessarily do it in the same way. This is why experts spend so long trying to establish a common language for expressing the flavous of wine and why, despite it being useful and laudable, it is ultimately impossible.

I’ve talked a bit about how wine tastes but now its time to understand why it tastes like that. How do the flavours get into the grapes in the first place and to do that we need to understand the manner in which they were grown (ie questions of grape variety, soil and climate). This is called Viticulture.

Then we’ll look at the manner in which they are made (ie questions of crushing, blending, fermentation) – this is called Viniculture.