Spend some time at our tasting table and you learn things – valuable things – about our guests. I’m thinking here about what they know (often surprising) and don’t know (at least equally surprising). This might only be interesting. What makes it valuable is what you can do with what you learn.
I want to treat every guest to an equal measure of respect and attention, but that doesn’t mean that I treat every one alike. For example, when I encounter someone with quite a good understanding of wine and long experience with it, I’m extra careful to be a good listener. This is in part because its very likely that this individual may well know a lot more than I do, but also because it’s generally true that folks who can talk about wine at a certain level may find relatively few opportunities to share what they know with someone who can appreciate their expertise, and they relish the opportunity. I want to indulge them in that, in part because it gratifies them, in part because it expands my own experience.
On the other side of it, there are quite a few of our guests who for various reasons have very little knowledge or understanding of wine and I have to treat them, not with less respect or attentiveness, I hope, but differently all the same. But I learn a lot from them, too.
For example, I was chatting last weekend with someone who had enjoyed a particularly light-bodied red wine and wondered if we had any others. Light, high-acid red wines are a bit of a specialty at the Bottle, and it was easy to pull down a few things from the shelf that I thought would suit her. She wanted to know about why only some wines had this profile and I did my best to explain this in terms of the challenges of growing grapes in extreme conditions (higher altitude and latitude, for example) – an explanation that didn’t seem to be having quite the effect I hoped for. The brightening countenance that signifies enlightenment was no where in evidence.
It was at that moment it occurred to me that I wasn’t really telling the truth. While it’s true that extreme environmental conditions can make it harder to ripen grapes, the immediate issue isn’t the conditions the wine is made in, rather its the choices winemakers are forced into because of them. A key one is having to plant grape varieties that can ripen where others won’t. Seen this way, it’s not the extreme conditions that are responsible for the kind of wine this guest was searching for, but the character of the grapes that are the winemaker’s last resort. Grapes that ripen early generally do so for a simple reason — they have less stuff to ripen. The stuff we’re talking about are phenolics.
Phenolics are a class of chemical compounds that include almost everything that gives wine flavor, aroma, color, and structure — all the elements that winemakers are trying to leach out of crushed grapes in the maceration stage. When present in abundance, phenolics make rich, flavorful, textured wines. Where the phenolic content is less, wine is lighter, crisper, sleeker. White wines have lower levels of phenols because white grapeskins contain less, but also because white grapes are pressed rather than crushed and macerated.
Red grapes with notably high phenolic content include cabernet sauvignon, malbec, and syrah (all late ripening varieties); those with low levels include schiava nera, pinot d’aunis, and poulsard.
I didn’t quite go into this level of detail with our guest, but having had a satisfactory explanation for WHY and HOW extreme conditions affect wine as they do seemed to satisfy her. She left having learned something that she can use to make good decisions in future, and I learned that even when you’re explaining something you think you understand very well a guest who isn’t getting it can make you dig a little deeper, with good results.
That’s it for now.
-Stephen
Weekly wine notes are archived at http://tableintime.com/weekly