Classic Wines

Know Your Palate: Earth and Minerality

In last week's column I talked about the importance of distinguishing fruit, earth and spice in wines, to discover what combination of those elements best suits your taste. I delved a bit into the fruity aspects of white wines, and now I'm going to talk about earth or minerality as the wine industry refers to it. in white wines. Minerality, for our purposes, is going to include everything you taste in a white wine that doesn't involve fruity of floral characteristics, that smells or tastes like it came from the earth. This includes mineral type flavors like you would find in a mineral water like Pellegrino, as well as vegetal characteristics that taste like grass or something leafy.

Now when you start talking about mineral or grassy flavors, it doesn't sound that appealing does it? Who wants to drink something that tastes like grass? But as soon as you get a whiff and a taste of a French Sancerre, you should probably get an idea of what I'm talking about. Sancerre is made from the Sauvignon Blanc grape, and is known for what wine people term herbaceousness, a very distinctive grassy taste. The crucial thing about a good Sancerre is that its herbaceous notes do not overwhelm the fruity aspects of the wine. A lot of people find this subtle combination intoxicating and delicious. But if you try it and you don't like it, that might just mean that you like a wine that displays less minerality and more fruit. Try a Sauvignon Blanc from somewhere warmer, like Australia or New Zealand for example, and you may have met your match.

Minerality also shows up in a lot of aged German or French Rieslings, as what the wine industry calls an oily or petrol (gasoline) flavor. Or in Chenin Blanc from the Loire Valley in France, it might show up as a distinctive wet wool odor and taste. Typically all the mineral characteristics of wine show up in areas where the weather is cooler, so the grapes do not ripen quite as much. This brings down the fruit components of the wine and allows these other earthy characteristics to show through. It's up to you to decide if you like that additional complexity or not.

As you get more interested in wine, it will just be a matter of time before you hear certain soil types mentioned. In the Burgundy region of France, for example, the limestone soils are credited with making the fine Chardonnay that area is known for. In France, as well as any other area that is known for making excellent wine, winemakers know that they need to stress their vines. The more the vines struggle to survive the better, because then their root structures will be forced to grow down deep into the soil, to pull out all the complex minerals from deep underground, which makes the grapes even more flavorful. Now, you might think that those minerals actually make their way into the grapes, and that's why you taste it in the wine, but research actually has not shown that to be true. The grapes themselves do not contain any of the same minerals that can be found in the soil. It seems that it is just this quest for survival that makes the grapes so much richer in flavor and complexity. When the vine is stressed and it thrusts its roots deep into the ground, it thinks it is dying. It is trying its hardest to find as many nutrients as it can to pour them all into the few grapes it is able to produce, because those grapes insure the survival of the species. Good winemakers know just how much to stress their vines so they produce grapes that are rich in complexity.

One result of the stress placed on the vines is a reduction in the yield in grapes. While the grapes that are produced are more concentrated and complex in flavor, the fact that there are fewer of them means that the wine is necessarily going to be more expensive. Just because these kinds of wines are more expensive, however, doesn't have to mean that you have to like them more, despite what wine snobs might say!

What I'd like you to discover for yourself is where your tastes lie. So go out and pick up a bottle of Sancerre. You should be able to find one for between 25-40 dollars a bottle. Then pick up a 10-15 dollar bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, and see which one you like better. Try to pick out the herbaceous qualities of the Sancerre. They won't be too hard to find. You'll probably see it in a reduced amount in the New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. And don't forget to pay attention to the fruit characteristics I talked about in the last column! You should pick up citrus notes in both, and possibly some more tropical notes in the New Zealand wine. The fruit elements should be much more prominent in the New Zealand wine. Now it's just up to you to decide which one you like better.

That's it for minerality. Check back next week when I'll discuss spice in white wines. Happy drinking!