With the world shut down by the Coronavirus and travel simply a fond recollection from the past, it is an ideal time to let your imagination run wild and virtually visit some of the most beautiful regions of the world by way of a wine glass. Wine not? Wine is produced all over the world and a bottle of finely made wine is meant to reflect the soil from which it sprang.
A well made wine will enable a skilled taster to identify innumerable factors about it, including the hemisphere in which the grapes were grown, the climate of the region, the soil type, the plants that grew nearby, and in some cases, the name of the actual vineyard itself. Magic? No, just years of tasting a lot of wine. As they say, the nose knows, and the palate reveals.
Now to be clear, no wine professional will have anything of value to say about a cheap, mass-produced wine. I have friends who will often present me with a glass of mystery wine and eagerly await me to wax poetic about its many virtues. They are usually disappointed when I fail to dredge up more than just a few positive notes about its eminent quaffability and value for money. This is a good reason to go out on a limb and buy a bottle that costs more than $10.
A wine that is made with care will reflect that care in every mouthful. True winemakers are artists. As a painter might, winemakers have an idea in their minds of what they want to create before they even begin. Choosing the grapes is crucial, like selecting the colors with which to paint. Nothing can save a painting created with cheap pigments just as nothing can save a wine created with cheap grapes.
It is said in the wine world that bad wine can be made with good grapes but good wine cannot be made with bad grapes. Everything comes down to the quality of the grapes. Areas like Napa, for instance, sell grapes to independent wine producers for sky-high prices. You may wonder why anyone would buy such expensive grapes when cheaper ones can be bought just down the road. The secret is in the soil.
They say there’s nothing like Napa’s “Rutherford dust” and indeed the grapes grown on that vaunted soil produce some of the finest wines in the world. The price of the fruit is high for a reason. The grapes come with a pedigree. The winemaker knows he or she must do precious little to produce a wine of stellar quality.
Often wine making is a question of manipulation. It is widely agreed that the less done to a wine, the better. Crush the grapes, ferment the juice, put it in good oak barrels, and let time do the heavy lifting. When the grapes are good, there is little else that needs doing. When the grapes are not so good, the challenges begin.
Many winemakers without the cash to buy pricey grapes buy cheaply grown, low quality grapes and try to create something of value. More often than not, they fail, but they really should be given credit for ingenuity. So much can be done to try to reproduce the flavor of a quality wine!
To achieve an oaky flavor without purchasing new oak barrels, inventive winemakers will add oak staves or oak chips to their wine. To add a vanilla flavor to the wine, winemakers may actually add vanilla essence or flavoring. To raise the alcohol content, winemakers will add sugar. So much can be done with artificial flavors and colors to manipulate a wine into…something it is not.
In the end, such efforts are truly in vain. Wine professionals are rarely if ever fooled by such tricks and it’s all that an enterprising winemaker can do to bottle their wine inventively with a clever label and try to sell it off as quickly as possible. You, as the consumer, must simply be wise enough not to buy it.
I can offer you a few tips to avoid disappointment. Don’t buy a wine for the label. Cute labels are a dime a dozen and usually mask a cheap wine. Seek out wines from specific vineyards or celebrated wine-producing areas of the world. Look for names of grapes and regions you can’t pronounce. Be brave! Think of this as a wine adventure.
If the label talks about a family history of wine making, you are on the right track. If the label talks about a specific winemaker and his or her goals, all is well in the world! No one is going to put their name on a bottle of cheap swill.
You can spend hundreds of dollars on your purchase or very little indeed. Truly, you don’t have to spend a lot of money to get a good bottle of wine. Excellent wine from around the world can be had for less than $20. You just have to do a little sleuthing to seek out the good ones.
Happy hunting! And cheers!
Leave a Reply