Wine 101 Wednesday—Crossing the Threshold

Yesterday we were talking about the nuts and bolts of wine judging—the actual procedures that enable us to taste so many wines in a day with minimal stress, and that also help us judges evaluate all the wines fairly and equally. Today, as we pick up where we left off, we'll look at exactly why professional wine judges (or anyone!) can have such varied opinions of what we smell and taste.

When it comes to aromatics in a wineglass, different tasters sometimes perceive the same things quite differently. It’s not that one person’s “grapefruit” is another person’s “pineapple”; it’s more that we all have our own unique set of “thresholds of perception.” So, if you have a very low threshold for (meaning a high sensitivity to) the grapefruit aroma, and I don’t—but I have a low threshold for pineapple (and you don’t)—then you’ll zero in on one, and I’ll pick up the other. (We can imagine that Panel D leader Wilfred Wong—see pic and recent posts) is deciding whether he's tasting cherries or raspberries in this flight of reds. Or maybe both!)

As a sidebar to that, there’s another level here that’s quite essential. Perceiving an aroma is one thing. Recognizing and naming it is another. Novice wine drinkers often feel baffled by the “lemongrass, gooseberry, eucalyptus” wine “descriptors” they read, hear and see in the media. That’s understandable.

But these descriptors are real: Mom Nature puts lots of different aromatic compounds into the grapes (and generates even more in the winemaking/bottle aging end of things). The key is that some of these aroma/flavor compounds are identical to (or similar enough to) aroma compounds found elsewhere in nature.

In simpler terms, a wine smells and tastes like—well, you name it (roses, vanilla, butter, whatever)—because the wine contains the same stuff that makes these other natural products smell and taste the way they do. A Gewurztraminer, for example, reminds us of roses because it contains geraniol, the key ingredient of the characteristic rose aroma. A Chardonnay can smell like vanilla because the oak barrels it was aged in contain vanillin, which the wine extracts. The butter aroma comes from diacetyl, a byproduct of malolactic fermentation. (More info to come. For now, just think movie-theater popcorn.)

As we wine judges work to evaluate a wine, we’re constantly coaxing out “descriptors” such as these, and trying to ID them. That helps us determine the “varietal correctness” of a wine, as well as its complexity, both of which play a vital role in our medal decision.

More on this very soon—and keep your questions and comments coming. Join me again tomorrow for a very special tasting. Until then,

Cheers,
Rosina
gilded fork, wine, wine writing, Welcome to Wine Country, Rosina Tinari Wilson