A Touch of Acidity

Two days ago, I tasted a 2008 Pinot Noir that was 13.5 % alcohol made in Tasmania. I had with my salmon for dinner and it was a really delightful meal. The taste of salmon does indeed blend well with the light fruity flavours of the Pinot (which by the way is a naturally high acidic grape) and the acidity was high enough to cut through the creamy richness of the avocado sauce. That's why a lot of cheeses are drunk with white wine. The acidity of a white wine can cut through cheeses better than reds because of its acidity. When the salmon was done, I had no choice but to down the remaining Pinot by itself. That was when calamity struck.

It was like a thousand volts of electric current running on the sides of my tongue (that is different from the sensation of heat that you get from the alcohol in the wine). What a shocker it was! That's what happens when you drink a highly acidic wine without food to accompany it or is it the other way around? I guess this also illustrates that what makes out as a good food wine doesn't necessarily mean it's good to drink by itself. The touchy thing about the acidity component in wines is that too much of it makes the wine taste sour or tart as the "pros" would like to describe. Too little of it makes the wine taste flat (another wine term coined by the professionals). Without the proper level of acidity, the wine appears out of balance with the fruit component or sweet component of the wine. The wine would lack freshness and liveliness.

A few years ago, a few pals and I were drinking a white wine at a temperature of around 8 to 10 degrees. A friend a mine made a remark, "Oh man, this wine is refreshing." I was thinking to myself that it was definitely a crisp wine. Crisp is a descriptive term that describes a wine with acidity that gives you mouth a clean feel. Sometimes it can be used interchangeably with the term "refreshing" as a wine with acidity that brings liveliness can be refreshing. So anyway, the wine didn't have much character but I was willing to give it a chance since the nose still appeared closed up as a lot of aromas can't be detected until the temperature of the wine rises. Minutes later, my friend tasted the same wine when it was warmer and he goes, "Blah! What is this?" Seems like that's when he realized how bland and liveless the wine was, that made him change his mind entirely about the wine.

It was when I realized that what my friend was on to something. That was when I also discovered that a serving a wine at a lower temperature accentuates the acidity of the wine, giving the wine a freshness on the palate. Why is that so? I tried this method in subsequent experiments and it seemed to work. My conclusion is that the coldness of the wine numbs the tongue in such a way that it mimics the sensation of the "attack" produced by acidity or people just prefer drinking down something that is chilled instead of leaving it warm enough on the tongue to detect lack of the acidity.

What is so important about acidity? It gives the wine a form of "brightness", like a lemon does in a good salmon. Without acidity, the wine will taste flabby (another wine term) or lean (this is more of a term for a wine that is low in fruit and noticeably high in acidity but it's not necessarily a bad thing…sometimes), sort of like a lifeless creature. Just imagine what orange juice would taste like without acid. I know I can't. In dessert or sweet wines that have little acidity, the wine becomes cloying (wine term alert) or saccharine, sort of like drinking syrup that sticks on your tongue. Thus, we hear the term "stickies" as synonymous to dessert wines. Although, that doesn't mean that a wine that is termed a sticky means a wine without sufficient acidity to balance with the sweetness in it.

When doing food and wine pairing, some people would like to match acidic dishes such as salads with vinegar and wines with high acidity because the formula is: acid in food + acid in wine = less acidity. What happens is that you will feel less "attack" from the wine and your food will taste less sour. When tasting a wine, always try to assess how acidic a wine is comparable to that of a lemon. It will help give you a better idea of how to pair food with wines and even the temperature you can serve it at.

Bunnamagoo Estate@Sydney Royal Easter Show

Bunnamagoo Estate is located on the outskirts of Mudgee and this was a surprise to me because I went to Mudgee but I didn't see the winery on its list of cellar doors to visit. Apparently, the winery is in the process of completing construction of its cellar door along Henry Lawson Drive, which I was told that it will be completed this June 2009. I was also told that the winery will have the third biggest winery in Mudgee, the first being Oatley and the second being Andrew Harris Vineyards. At the Easter Show, I had the opportunity to taste their wines and meet winemaker, Robert Black. In the 2009 James Halliday Wine Companion, the winery was given four stars, which is considered a very good producer.

According to the handouts they were giving out. The soils of their vineyards are deep, volcanic basalts and this contributes to the great complexity of their wines. The Estate produces a range of wines such as their pinot noir-chadonnay sparking and their botrytis Semillon. They have two ranges of wines, the Mount Lawson Range, which is their entry label wines priced from $15 onwards and their Bunnamagoo Range, which is from $20 onwards. I find them well priced and of good value after tasting both their ranges.

As I tasted their wines, I noticed an emerging pattern in their wines. A consistency of French oak is apparent in Robert's wines but 3 wines that day caught my attention.



Bunnamagoo 2006 Shiraz 15% alch
Nose of blackberry, chocolate, sweet and fruity. An enticing nose with hints of complexity. On the palate, medium bodied, balanced vanillan oak and smooth tannins. What I like about this wine is that it doesn't have the heat from the alcohol or taste excessively ripe. At $20 lovely to drink.

Bunnamagoo 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon 14.5% alch
Nose of blackberry, vanillan, blackcurrant leaf. On the palate, cedar, fine grained tannins, The mid-palate doesn't die off but is substituted by the cedary oak and gives the wine some extra length.

Bunnamagoo 2006 Autumn Semillon 9% alch (375ml)
A botrytised wine with a nice label featuring a piece of art taken from the Kids Earth Fund Collection (http://www.kidsearthfund.org.au/). The proceeds of each sale goes to the fund to enrich the lives of the children through art. The estate doesn't earn much margin from this wine. Cost $15 per bottle

Aromas of apricots, honey, lemon rind and slight cedary oal. With 9% alch, the wine is easy to drink with citrus acidity to match the sweetness. Makes a wonderful and affordable gift to ladies, and supports a good cause.

A-Z Wine Alphabets

These photos were taken at David Lowe's vineyard at Mudgee. I find it really interesting. Not only is David a fantastic winemaker, he knows how to design a cellar door.

A - Ampelography, the science of wine identification

B – Botrytis, a fungus which grows on grapes that can result in sweet grapes under the right conditions

C – Cabernet, cabernet sauvignon or cabernet franc is a red wine grape

D – Durif, a red wine grape, also known as Petite Sirah

E – Earth
F – Fermentation, the process which turns sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide
G - Grape

H – Harvest

I – Inflorescence, a cluster of flowers
J – Juice

K - Kaolin, clay mineral found in soil

L – Lees, deposits of residual yeasts
M– Must, grape juice which contains the skins, seeds and stems

N- Node, the place on a plant stem where leaves, fruits and flowers are attached
P – Pinot, pinot noir or pinot meunier is a red grape, pinot gris, pinot grigio or pinot blanc is a white grapes
O - Oxygen, too much of it causes the wine to go spoilt but in small qualities, it adds complexity and softens the wine

Q - Quercus, the species of oak trees, used in making barrels to store wine

R - Riesling, a white grape

S – Screwcap, or stelvin, the closure for wine bottles
T – Terrior, a French word for the physical and environmental characteristics of a vineyard that affects the quality of the grapes
U - Unctuous, a term to describe a full bodied and sweet wine V - Vinifera, vitis vinifera, the species of vine that produces most of the wine grapes in the world

W – Wine

X – Ximenez, or pedro ximenez, a red grape used in the production of sherry, a fortified wine

Y – Yeast, microscopic organism that causes fermentation to occur
Z – Zinfandel, a red grape

Making Sense of our Senses

A strange incident happened a week ago when I was doing some wine tasting at Mudgee. A couple of classmates of mine and me were doing lots of tastings that day and we came across two wines which had a mix of us liking it and others hating it. It was only later that our host pointed out to us that the one of the wines were corked (affected by cork taint which affects the aroma and taste) and the other was affected by brettanomyces (a yeast spoilage). This surprised most of us greatly as what some of us thought was really good wine turned out to be spoiled wine. Which raises a curious question on what exactly is good wine. Is it really true that one' garbage can be another man's treasure even when it comes to wine? Are "good" aromas and flavours subjective to the person?

Each person is born with different palates. A person's preference for certain aromas and flavours is shaped by not only the food that one is exposed to in their culture while growing up, but that each of us has a different tongue from one another. Contrary to what we have been taught in school, our taste receptors are located on different parts of the tongue and there is no distinct region which we experience certain tastes. The tastes that we sense with our tongue are sweet, sour, salty, bitter and a fifth one, umami. Umami, translated from Japanese (and discovered by a Japanese as you would have guessed), would mean roughly as meaty or savoury; the type of taste sensation you get form seaweed or MSG. Generally for all wines, you would get to experience all these taste sensations except saltiness which you don't find very common in wine except for maybe sherry.

What about identifying flavours? Most of us wouldn't have any problem remembering how a carrot or a strawberry tastes like. Maybe some of us would have a problem if we were asked to identify ingredients like sage or saffron blindfolded. So it all comes down to familiarity or practice to some. As we taste more of the same flavours, the memory of it gets etched in our head. So the culture in which we are brought up in, which influences the food that is set on our tables everyday as we were growing up, plays a very big part in shaping our preferences for certain aromas or flavours. It also makes us recognize certain flavours and aromas more distinctly than others. For example, I noticed that each time I tasted Sauvignon Blanc, it reminds me of Guava. I ate a lot of guava as a kid. Others would tell me that it would smell of passionfruit. It does all right but it doesn't just come to my mind as instinctively as guava does (which hints to you that I hardly ate much passionfruit in my childhood days).

So back to the question as to how what was considered as spoiled wine could have passed off as something acceptable to the tasters. I suppose that would be equivalent to another question as to how I notice some people can stand eating cabbage that smells pretty gross or cloves of garlic without cringing. If I were to use my deductive reasoning, I would have to say that each of us have different diets and due to years of conditioning, somehow, we are able to reach different levels of tolerance for different aromas or flavours. What passed off noticeably as corked wine to me didn't seem that way for other tasters and so we had different ratings for the wine. In the same way, the aromas that I enjoyed in the "brett" wine were pretty digusting to some of the others. It seems possible that we could enjoy wines that were spoiled as long as nobody told us. So next time you try a bottle of wine and you love it but someone tells you it's spoiled, just remember, one man's meat is another man's poison. Just make sure you don't go home with a tummy ache, which I believe none of us did that day when we tasted those wines. What a relief!