The Wine Savant: A Guide to the New Wine Culture Read Online Free Page A

enough to develop a sense of just how good wine can get and what distinguishes the princely stuff from the plonk. No doubt some drinkers will never be able to differentiate a Grand-Puy-Lacoste from a Gallo Hearty Burgundy, but there aren’t very many people with palates that leaden; even the completely uninitiated can usually recognize a superior wine when they taste one. And up to a certain point, there is a correlation between price and quality—a $60 premier cru Burgundy is going to be a big step up from a $15 Sonoma Pinot Noir. There is a degree of refinement and complexity in a grand cru Chablis that you will not find in Yellow Tail Chardonnay, and if you are intent on cultivating your palate, it is good to be familiar with those differences.
    W HAT M AKES FOR A G REAT W INE?
    â€¢Â  Aromatic complexity A great wine will give off a potpourri of aromas—some sweet (fruit, flowers), others savory (earth, spices)—and will have you dipping your nose in the glass constantly. Some wines literally smell so good that you don’t want to taste them.
    â€¢Â  Concentration A great wine packs a lot of flavor, and those flavors run deep. With some wines you sense a bit of dilution; you’ll occasionally hear oenophiles describe a wine as having a “hollow midpalate,” which is wine-geek jargon for thinness of flavor. Great wines taste concentrated . But note: depth of flavor has nothing to do with depth of color or density. The lightest, most delicately textured wines can pack huge amounts of flavor.
    â€¢Â  Balance In a really great wine, the fruit, acidity, and tannins (if it’s a red) will be perfectly balanced, and there will be an unmistakable sense of harmony to the wine—a feeling that each element is perfectly integrated and that each is in perfect proportion to the others. Great wines have a seamlessness about them and a sense of completeness—nothing missing, nothing extraneous.
    â€¢Â  Crescendo I find that truly great wines tend to unfurl slowly in the mouth, building in flavor and intensity as they cross the palate. For me, it is the telltale sign that I’ve got something special in the glass. Wine geeks refer to this sensation as the “peacock’s tail”—the flavors puff up and fan out. Call it what you want, but that peacock’s tail or crescendo is another hallmark of a great wine.
    â€¢Â  Length With a great wine, the flavors persist long after you’ve swallowed the juice. Sometimes the finish lasts a minute; other times it can linger well beyond that. But persistence is another mark of a brilliant wine.
    The most overrated attribute in a wine: fruitiness. Yes, wine is made from grapes, grapes are a fruit, and wine is thus a fruit-based beverage. But the fruitiness in a wine just isn’t terribly interesting. Whether it’s evocative of cherries, strawberries, or blackberries, it’s still just fruit. It smells good, it’s part of the pleasure, but I think it is the least compelling aspect of a wine. I’m more drawn to savory elements—herbs, spices, minerality, and so forth. I think the French have it exactly right: the grape, along with the vine, is primarily a vehicle for conveying the influence of the vineyard—the goût de terroir , as they put it. The best wines have plenty of ripe, appealing fruit—it is the minimum required—but they offer much more than that: they show aromatics that go far beyond the cherry-and-berry thing, and they exude a real sense of place. A great Châteauneuf-du-Pape, for instance, will have lots of exuberant fruit, but it will give off a strong whiff of lavender and other plants of the garrigue , as the fragrant scrub that you find in Provence is known.
    The most underrated attribute in a wine: texture. Wine writers use the term mouth feel to describe the physical sensation of a wine flowing across the tongue. Alas, the phrase mouth feel is a bit clunky; so I