Latest features You and your taste in wine

Date Published:

20/04/2009

When it comes to spitting and swallowing, don’t let the gurus get you down. According to the experts, there are no rules when it comes to wine – as 4Food discovers, it's all down to personal taste

Food and wine

As a rule of thumb, go for light wines with light-flavoured dishes, and heavy wines with richer flavoured dishes. But there really are no rights or wrongs when it comes to food and wine matching.

Keep experimenting. One's tastes rarely stay constant through time, so a style of wine you didn't fancy years ago may well become your favourite today.

Acidity or freshness

If a wine makes you salivate, then its acidity is a major part of its flavours. So, as a rule, most white wines tend to be more acidic (or 'fresh' in their feel) than most red wines. And wines from cool climates will appear 'fresher' than wines from hot places.

Whether you want a wine to feel fresh on your palate or not is another matter. This will probably depend a lot on circumstances such as season, ambient temperature and the occasion (what you're eating with the wine, for example).

All wines contain some acidity, but some will display it more than others. A sweet red wine, like a port, will not appear acidic at all, because all the other flavours mask the acidity. So the lighter the wine, the more its acidity will show. Think of Champagne, or German Rieslings.

On the contrary, a wine that lacks acidity will appear soft, and even 'flabby'.

Fruit aromas and flavours

Aroma = smell; flavour = taste. One would expect wine to smell and taste of the fruit it uses: grapes. But it rarely does, since the fermentation and ageing processes alter the initial grape aromas and flavours.

So one finds all sorts of other analogies for the aromas and flavours of a wine. And they are analogies, as no wine smells exactly like peaches, for example. These analogies are often derived from other fruits. Many wine professionals take this exercise too far, and drown you with layers of far-fetched smells and flavours that may leave you thinking 'is this person bonkers?'. Don’t worry! Picking out aromas and flavours requires a bit of practice, and the fact that one cannot put a name to everything doesn’t mean that one is unable to appreciate a wine. One can enjoy a book without being a literary critic...

When a wine is young, it tends to have most or all of its aromas that remind one of fruit and flowers. As it ages, these so-called primary aromas fade away and are often replaced by others which are harder to define.

Softness or sweetness

This is the corollary to acidity or freshness. A wine that is low on acidity may seem soft or rounded. And sweetness will mask a lot of other flavours, especially acidity.

Just try tasting a glass of pure lemon juice and then again after adding one, then two spoonfuls of sugar to it. So many wines that appear sweet actually contain quite a lot of acidity that is masked by their sweetness. And this will usually show on the finish, when the wine has been swallowed and you are left with a fresh after-taste.

What is tannin?

Tannins are substances found in grape skins and therefore also in wines, mainly red. You can usually identify them by a dry feeling produced in the mouth. The texture of the wine may well appear a little harsh as well.

Tannin, for technical reasons, is almost only to be found in red wines. But not in all red wines, and not in equal quantities. Certain grape varieties are more tannic than others. Amongst well-known varieties that are often tannic are: cabernet sauvignon, merlot, malbec, syrah, sangiovese and tempranillo. But the intensity of these tannins will also depend on production conditions, such as climate and wine-making. On the other hand, pinot noir, but also zinfandel, gamay and grenache are varieties that tend to have much less tannin.

Tannins always seem more intense in a young wine, and they will become less and less 'aggressive' when the wine spends some years in the barrel, and then in the bottle. In fact, their presence is one of the reasons for ageing a wine in oak barrels.

The reverse side of this coin is that tannins are one if the factors that help a wine to age well. They form, in a red wine, a large part of what is sometimes called the structure of a wine, rather like the skeleton in our bodies.

Peruse wine articles, tips and recipes on 4Food’s wine hub.

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