Assessing quality
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When tasting the wine it is important to remain objective about it's qualities that make it valuable as a product as opposed to other wines. Well all have our preferences, our likes and dislikes, however our aim here is not leisure, but to rank these goods and to predict their future potential. Well all right then, a little bit of a leisure too.
GARNET HILL
First things first
The glass. It has to be clean and dry, and polished. Washing up liquid stuck to the side of the glass would totally ruin and alter the perception of the qualities of the wine and that would be a shame wouldn't it?
It's not a good idea to wear parfume on yourself either, for the same reason. All in all, the environment where you perform this assessment has to be free of disturbing odours, has to be as neutral as possible. And bright. For first we are going to look into our glass of wine...they look so...different...
Surely, so far you might not know a lot about the subtle differences in the color of claret wines, other than they leave a more or less equally ugly stain on your white tablecloth if you knock over your glass.
Much more rewarding though is to observe the color through your glass! A lot of information is gained at this - often overlooked - 1st step. For a start, check whether your wine is clear or may be hazy?It will be clear most of the time however very old wines may become more opaque and loose their shine, and may appear to be slightly hazy. That is fine. This does not decrease their value. Avoid extremes though.
Next you will notice that the wine has a certain depth of color to it. Is it quite transparent or mostly opaque. I can tell you right now that observing a claret that is very transparent, well... not a good sign. Although an inky, dark wine does not guarantee quality either! More about that later. The color itself may range from inky purple to brown. The latter is a sure way of telling that your claret bit the dust and you can't derive any pleasure from drinking it, likewise it has no money value either. But these were the extreme ends really, and in most cases you will encounter 3 main colors, ruby - garnet - tawny and myriads of their intermediaries....
You know when you leave a half apple on the kitchen table? The flesh slowly takes on a brown color. The same happens with wine and for the same reason. It is a slow oxidation. Oxygen both supports and destroys life. But that is not necessarily a bad thing because it is oxygen as well that matures our claret, helps it to realize complexity and finesse.
For now, just remember that the sequence in which claret changes it's color is this: purple - ruby - garnet - tawny - brown. In a nutshell.
Therefore a wine at the beginning of it's life will be of a ruby color and by the time it becomes tawny or brownish you can safely bet it reached the end of the road. And it is a bad idea to invest in it when you see this happening...
It is important to note however that the color indicates a relative age of the wine to itself, you cannot directly tell, say, this wine is 5 years old because it has a ruby-garnet color...
Therefore a ruby-garnet wine may be 10 years old - in which case you know its is a good vintage as well as a quality producer, but then a ruby-garnet wine might as well be 1 years old, in which case you know that it is either a poor vintage or a more generic, mass scale production one. You can find out more about the aging curve on the pieces of the puzzle page.
There is something else to the eye and just by looking you can have an informed guess about the ripeness of the grapes when harvested. The berries collect sugar as they ripen, and in turn this sugar will create the alcohol in the wine.
Swirl the wine slowly in the glass for two seconds. Then stop, and look at the side of it. You will see little drops developing and falling back to the bottom. How thick or thin they are and how fast or slow they move is the question. The good sign is if they are thick rather than thin, but most importantly they move slowly. Observing this, you can be sure that your claret was made using ripe grapes - that is to say, the berries had adequate sugar when harvested.
Later you will find out that there are different sorts of ripeness, sugar ripeness is one of them, while phenolic ripeness is something else. To make matters complicated these do not necessarily go hand in hand...but more about that later.
These droplets you see are referred to as legs, or tears, or even cathedral windows... but you want to know what is happening, and why is it a sign of ripeness of sugar (or the lack of it thereof?). When you swirl the wine basically you cover the inner side of your glass with 3 things, water, ethanol and glycerol. Ethanol is the main alcohol of wine and it is the ethanol - or ethyl alcohol content - you see on the label expressed by volume of the wine.
It is created by the fermentation of the sugar. Thus more sugar in the must, potentially more ethanol. But what is glycerol then? Glycerol is the secondary alcohol of wine, but when it comes to observing the 'legs' it is more important for us. It has a viscous, sticky quality, it sticks to the side of the glass. When you taste the wine, this alcohol gives it roundness, mouth feel. What important is that the amount of glycerol is directly proportional to the amount of ethyl alcohol produced during fermentation. More alcohol, more glycerol. Although the type of yeast used for fermentation also has it's part to play.
Glycerol, being an alcohol evaporates considerably faster than water. What you see falling back are water droplets, and what there is between them and in their way is - guess? - glycerol. This is why you can assume that, the slower these 'legs' move, the more glycerol there is in their way. And that is a good sign of course, as you can be sure that they have a higher alcohol content as well, so the wine is made from berries that had adequate sugar content when harvested.Let me stress again, there are different sorts of ripeness and sugar ripeness per se does not guarantee quality. About all of this serious technical stuff you can read about in the pieces of the puzzle section, as you know by now.
Before moving on, there is something else about the color of our claret. Tilt the glass 45 degrees and hold a white paper in the background. You can squint a little. Look in the middle of your glass. This is the so called core of the wine. Round the edges is the so called rim of the wine.
The distance between the core and the rim will be different depending on how developed the wine is. They start out with little or no separation between the core and rim but as red wines age this distance is going to grow. More, the color of the rim is going to change as well. Fortunately it will change in a way we are already familiar with from the previous page. Purple-pink-ruby-garnet-tawny-brown. Remember? The rim follows this pattern, however it is always ahead of the core in this respect. So a ruby core wine may have garnet or tawny rim but it is quite impossible that a ruby core wine would have a purple rim!
So, by now you know how the core and rim of the wine tells you about it's relative age, and you are familiar with the meaning of the appearance of the 'legs'.
Take a deep breath and... hang on... is it not a better idea to sniff carefully?
The nose of the wine...
Indeed, spare your nose and know that it can get tired very easily. We humans can differentiate between thousands of aromas, yet for most of us it is difficult to identify even those we encounter day by day in our lives or at least those that are accessible. Can you tell the scent of a cinnamon stick for cloves? The scent of a fresh strawberry for a ripe apple?
We are taught to read, write, but we are not taught to smell.
Fortunately everyone can expand his 'vocabulary of scents' through training. It is like learning a foreign language. The bigger is your vocabulary, the better you speak the language. This is no different when it comes to the language of claret.
First we want to know whether or not the condition of the nose is clean or faulty in any way. There are several things that can go wrong with our wine, but the 2 most common things are oxidation and cork taint.
The cork might not seal perfectly, in which case oxidation of the wine can occur. This will increase the volatile acidity, vapid, vinegary scent and in the same time strips our wine of all pleasant aromas that normally make up the nose. This is accompanied by a brownish tinge and a 'burnt character' in the most extreme cases. The wine cannot be saved at this stage.
The other common fault is the cork taint or 'corked' wine. Its easy to smell a moldy, unpleasantly earthy character in these wines as the our perception threshold for this fault is extremely low. The flavor will also be masked by this moldy taste. This fault cannot be repaired either.Fortunately we have only 3-5% chance of encountering such wines.
A good claret can display a wealth of scents, indeed complexity and subtlety is something that greatly increases it's worth.raspberry, blackcurrant, bilberry, blackberry, cherry, prune, rose, violet, green pepper, truffle, cedar, licorice, vanilla, cloves, cinnamon, leather, coffee, dark chocolate, and more..
Young - and great - claret will most likely display the scent of these berries as well as cherries and roses, violets. It is because these are the aromas associated with the youth of the wine also referred to as primary aromas (or varietal aromas). Later on as the wine develops these scents gradually fade only to give way to a new groups of aromas, the tertiary (aging) aromas.
Secondary (fermentation) aromas are created during the fermentation, so a young wine will contain a mix of varietal and fermentation aromas. Examples of the latter are: cloves, blackcurrant bud, saffron.
Tertiary aromas really show up after long years of aging, so being patient is rewarding as great complexity can be reached in good vintages. Some of the aging aromas are: prune, mushroom, truffle, licorice, vanilla, coffee, caramel, brioche..
Depending then, at which life stage of the wine you taste it, you are more or less likely to encounter these aromas. Certainly, a great year such as 1995 will start to display these aromas only about one and a half decade later...so drinking a 1995 from a top estate in say 1998 is an unpardonable sin let alone wasting your money...
As with the color, the nose of the wine also has intensity or depth to it. This often changes with time and sometimes closed or light wines on the nose will open up as they age. Similarly, a claret that has a pronounced nose in it's youth may loose depth as it ages.
The depth of the nose usually has a lot to do with phenolic ripeness as well as it is connected to alcohol content. Wines with a higher alcohol content smell more intensive, more pronounced. This is because the rising alcohol molecules carry the scents with themselves. It is easy to understand this sniffing a Port for example...With that said, a great claret should not have an alcohol content much in excess of 12.5 - 13%. The real challenge of the winemaker is to create complex, ripe, balanced wines at more or less this alcohol content and not more. A claret should never be full bodied.
Next, we can assess the development of the wine, and the freshly acquired knowledge of the aroma categories will come in handy now.
Young - developing - developed - passed it's best?
Let's say, a mostly fruity red with maybe some hints of violets will be a young wine - these are all primary aromas. As soon as you discover licorice, leather, etc aromas as well, your wine is developing. When these aromas are fully blown (probably pairing up with new subtle aging aromas) your wine may still be developing but as these slowly start to fade you can be sure it is going down the hill. Though this 'going down the hill' stage can take any time between a couple of years to a couple of decades or even more. Depending on vintage and of course on the Chateau itself.....
As you see it is quite complex, but you get a general idea.
These aromas can also be grouped in the following order: Vegetal, floral, fruity, spicy, animalistic, mineral. Quite straightforward, maybe with the exception of the 2 latter. Animalistic aromas may include leather, or a barnyardy, earthy scent (which does not sound great until you actually find it in one wine and discover that you like it.) A mineral character may mean nuances of flint, wet stone. These are actually more prevalent in great white Burgundies than in Bordeaux reds.
...and now to the taste...It is actually by tasting the wine that you can tell the most about it's quality.
First just a round up on what you have to pay attention to, then I will go into details about each attribute. Body, alcohol content (these are not the same), acidity, texture, tannin level and quality, sugar content, intensity of flavor, flavor quality, aftertaste, balance.This is where the fun really begins...most of these things here - with the exception of flavor quality are attributes that can be judged objectively. If you put professional and experienced tasters in the same room and give them the same wine they will come up with very similar readings regarding these qualities.
Flavor quality - the actual flavor is a different matter all together and obviously depends on your memories of flavors. Your scent and flavor vocabulary. You remember? One will not identify 'brioche' in the nose of the wine unless he tried brioche back in his life and knows how it smells like. Others without this 'scent entry' in their vocabulary will use the closest approximation...let's say, 'toasted bread'.
Body. This is the mouth feel of the wine. Does not equal the alcohol content, which is part of the body, but the overall impression is formed by the combination of the alcohol content and the texture (or density) of the wine. Thus, a wine with a medium alcohol content might be light bodied in the grand scheme of things because it is quite dilute, light texture. Similarly a wine with a low alcohol content might be medium bodied because it is dense in texture. Alcohol content. This is more straightforward. Light, m-, m, m+, high alcohol content. Ideally a claret should move in the 3 ms, medium minus, medium, medium plus. (12-13%)
Acidity. This is the tartaric acid content of the wine. Its easy to sense it, high acidity makes your mouth water. Low acidity makes the wine soft but might make it taste flabby if it is too low. Some 2003 wines have low acidity. It's also called the 'spine' of the wine and it's amount determines longevity.Texture. This forms part of the 'body'. How do you perceive the wine. Soft? Rough? Coarse?
Tannin level and quality. Another type of acid, the tannin displays itself in a form of a drying, gripping, astringent sensation especially on your gums and tongue. Importantly, this acid preserves the wine from degradation caused by the oxygen. It's a blanket the protection under which the wine can age gracefully and develop. The amount depends on the vintage (which determines the size of the berries) as well as on the varietal composition. Smaller berries = better skin to fruit ratio = more tannin.(Warmer years tend to produce small berries.) Petit Verdot and Cabernet Sauvignon have a thick skin and can extract lots of tannins. Merlot has thinner skin.
The quality of the tannins can be stalky, green (in years when the phenolic ripeness is not adequate) or ripe in good years. Importantly, even when the tannins are ripe, they may taste coarse, in the youth of the wine. But this softens out as the wine ages. And there is nothing better than an aged, silky, soft tannin claret... On the other hand, from a poor vintage, a green, stalky tannin will remain so even with aging.
Sugar content. Pretty straightforward, fortunately we don't have to worry about this feature, claret will always be dry. Just for you to know, you can sense sweetness on the tip of your tongue. There is something else here, alcohol sweetness. That's right. A wine with a very high alcohol content might taste sweet, even though it contains no residual sugar. By the way, the sweetness - dryness is often confused with the drying sensation of the tannins. Just to be clear, the dryness of the wine is the absence of residual sugars and not the presence of tannins.
Intensity of flavor. light, m-, m, m+, pronounced. This is an important reading, and has to do with the dry extract content of the wine. That is, the dry parts to the liquid parts. In a poor year for instance, under insufficient phenolic ripeness, the wine will not have a great intensity of flavor, for the flavor will probably be diluted by much rain and little sunshine.
Aftertaste. A very important attribute that is directly connected to the quality, and to the quality of the vintage. Again, it is the dry extract content that gives intensity and aftertaste to the wine and a long aftertaste is always a good sign. Likewise, a cold, rainy year that produces no phenolic ripeness and therefore little extract will result in wines with short aftertaste.
Balance. The highest aspiration a claret can reach. All components - alcohol, body, acidity, tannins, are in perfect balance with each other and none reigning over another. Perfection.
How to Taste Bordeaux Red Wine
GARNET HILL
