Newbie wine question: Flavors

That may be a newbie question, but I still wonder about it after 30 years experience.

What would a few cedar chips do to a red wine? Is cedar poisonous? How about a nice Havana cigar (or a portion of one) dropped into a barrel of Cabernet?

At one time it was thought that Heitz added eucalyptus leaves to his Martha's Vineyard wines, thus accounting for their famously "minty" flavor. When asked about it, he opined that the eucalyptus trees surrounding the vineyard deposited droplets of sap onto the fruit. I was skeptical at first, but I observed the same minty character in a Santa Maria Pinot Noir some years ago. I didn't like it at all in Pinot Noir, but the point is that vineyard is surrounded by eucalyptus trees. In recent years I've observed that whoever is cultivating those vines covers the rows nearest the trees (within ~100 feet) with plastic wrap for several weeks prior to harvest. Looks to me like Joe Heitz maybe wasn't BSing us after all...

Tom S

Salut/Hi Vincent,

le/on Sun, 11 Jul 2004 05:15:08 GMT, tu disais/you said:-

Yup, as the person tasting tries to describe, using analogy, the flavours that they find in the wine. There are only four "pure" flavours for which we are physiologically equipped to taste. Sweet, sour, salt, bitter. ALL the rest are in fact smells.

If you think about it, how many words do we have that describe smells? Unlike colours, or sounds we have NO vocabulary for smells at all. ALL the words come by analogy. So we say "Lemon" or "flowery", but these are simply saying "this smells like a lemon" or this smell reminds me of flowers. Without any common experience these analogies are useless. Sounds can be described by the frequency, as can colours, and you can "reproduce" the exact same sound (shurrup Hi Fi nuts) and colour, simply by using the same mix of frequencies as the original. Smells are not like that.

So in fact if I were to say "Aha, this wine has cherries on the nose", what I really mean is "there is a component in the smell of this wine that reminds me of the smell of cherries". (usually used for the taste, by the way).

One hopes not. That said, I've heard dark rumours of the consumption of strawberry and banana essences in wine making areas. More openly, I've read here of fruit juice flavoured wines on sale.

Well, it can be, I suppose. I've read some pretty far fetched descriptions sometimes. But in the examples you've chosen,

I've had all these, quite clearly.

Youngish wines made with the Merlot grape often have a distinct blachberry-ish component on the nose and in the mouth.

Chocolate is most commonly used in conjunction with sweet wines, Maury from the mediterranean coast of France is often said to have a chocolate element, and I can't disagree, I've found it on other wines of the same time. I've also noted elements reminding me of chocolate (and tobacco too) in Tokaji Aszu as it gets older.

Leather. This is pretty common. In Australian wines, it's sometimes described with the attractive phrase "sweaty saddle"! Wines with loads of flavour, and made from very ripe grapes - I've found it along with plums and plum jam in Oz Shiraz based wines - seem to be prone to a leathery sort of smell/taste.

But all these are the result of people groping to describe something for which there's no real vocabulary, and therefore trying to find a common experience pool to help others share their impressions. One last example is the expressions "Cats pee" and "Gooseberries" used to describe (caricature) Sauvignon wines from New Zealand. If you've never tasted gooseberries, that's completely useless as a description of course, and cat's pee isn't exactly a recommendation. Nevertheless, anyone who knows NZ sauvignons knows _exactly_ the sort of flavour profile we're talking about, and agree that these expressions are the best short cut descriptions we've found yet.

The straighforward answer is "no, they do not add these flavours".

However, various other things are occaisionally added to improve the flavour. You mentioned oak - sometimes the oak flavour comes from added oak chips, not the barrel. Tartaric acid is routinely added in some parts of the world to raise acid levels. Likewise in some areas sugar is added to keep up alcohol levels. Or grape juice can be added just before bottling.

The more exostic flavours discussed by tasters are not added - or at least should not be added.

Others have already supplied good answers to your questions. I will just add that descriptions like this are not limited to wines. For instance, if I hand you a walnut in its husk that has just fallen from a tree and ask you what it smells like, you'll probably say "it smells lemony," because the husk contains several volatile organic compounds that are also present in lemon rind. As a footnote, if I then present you with a freshly picked lemon and ask you to compare its smell to the walnut husk, you can easily tell the difference between "lemon" and "lemony." All this is just a longwinded way of saying that our vocabulary for olfaction is woefully crude and all these written descriptions of tasting are like those blind men describing an elephant based on feel. ;-)

Mark Lipton

I see. So when a wine's nose is described as saddle leather, they probably work with horses in the vineyard. How romantic ;^D

Sorry, coudn't resist. Martin

Chemistry actually backs up a lot of the claims of wine tasters. For instance, a Chardonnay can be characterised as "Buttery". Sounds bizzare, but a certain kind of yeast produce in fermentation the same chemical as found in butter flavoring for popcorn!

In my school days, one of my favorite experiments was creating "esters". From a bunch of strange chemicals, including Sulfuric Acid and certain alcahols we produced the smell of banana (well more like banana flavored lollies or milk).

Essentially the reaction between an alcohol and an acid produces an ester and water (probably in quantities that won't affect taste much at all).

When different kinds of grape are fermented, different acids can bond with alcahol, producing different smells. The longer wine is stored in the bottle, the more of these chemicals are produced, and the primary fruit flavors that you might find actually eating the grapes themselves tend to fade.

An aged wine might take on the smell of leather... just speculating here, but an ester produced from tannic acid and alcahol might actually fit the bill.

I guess in a sense the winemakers do put these smells in. By extracting more tannins from the skins when they crush the grapes, they might find that in years to come, certain flavors and smells will be created. Generations of experience go into these sort of formulations.

Esters are just one kind of chemical you might find in wine. I'm sure there are plenty of references out there for those who are interested.

Is your name Oliver White or George DuBoeuf? :) Dale

Dale Williams Drop "damnspam" to reply

Diacetyl (butter flavor) is produced during malolactic fermentation, which is done by bacteria, not yeast.

Yup, I loved that experiment, too, but preferred the pineapple ester.

Hmmm... This seems a bit simplistic to me. The primary fruit flavors are low molecular weight esters that might very well diffuse out of the wine slowly over the years. New esters are almost certainly produced as you describe it, but what acids might be involved I cannot guess.

Doubtful. The other major classes of odorants in wine are sulfur-containing molecules (sulfides and thiols). Many of the "tertiary" aromas are the result of these sorts of molecules, giving rise to suggestions of mushrooms, tar, earth, leather and truffles. FWIW, many of these same odorants would be unpleasant if present in higher quantities (many people actually *like* eau de skunk at very low levels).

Sorry, Oliver, just a (lame) joke. Duboeuf is famous for the "banana-candy" sameness of his wines. Your comments about artificial banana flavors triggered a reaction.

As a funny (to me) aside, Pierre Rovani, Parker's "Man in Burgundy", has raved over Duboeuf's 2003s. And he made this comment on the Squires board:

"A number of years ago he had producers with whom he had contracts using an artificial yeast that promoted fruitiness. That yeast was also responsible for tropical flavors like banana... and had a way of masking some of the differences between the crus. When he realized what was happening that was stopped. Today, the growers he buys from typically only use indigenous yeasts. The "Duboeuf signature" of the old days is no longer there... and I'd bet money you'd adore the wines if tasted blind."

Now, I'm no winemaking expert, but I have trouble imagining these "rogue growers" being responsible. Last time I looked, doesn't the winemaker add commercial yeast? In any case the idea that this guy (by far the biggest producer in Beaujolais) had to "realize" what was happening in his wines (when everyone else with knowledge knew exactly which yeast, one called 71B, was being used) marks him as either a bit dense or something. Dale

Dale Williams Drop "damnspam" to reply

Dale, Like you, I've marveled at the lionization (to use the polite term) of DuBoeuf in the WA. Parker has on several occasions lauded Georges DB's abilities as a taster (which BTW I have no reason to doubt) and has often given very high praise even to the "Flower" bottlings, which I've found to be bland, commercial offerings. This latest review from Rovani (in the WA), however, goes even beyond Parker's adulation. I also agree about that lame excuse for the banana-esque flavors: who, if not the winemaker, chooses the yeast? (And the labeling of those yeasts as "artificial" is both amusing and revealing)

Mark Lipton

p.s. I do, OTOH, plan on trying the 2003s from Brun and Lapierre ASAP.

"Mark Lipton" in news:cd6jop$8ga$ snipped-for-privacy@mozo.cc.purdue.edu...

Constantine Costa-Gavras's polemical docu-drama film _Z_ (1969) opens with a military Inspector-General (of Greece, though not explicitly) making a speech, asserting a link between ideologies (especially Socialism and Communism) and the appearance of sunspots. (He then ties in wine, smoothly, comparing the treatment of grapes against mildew to prevention of dangerous political notions in the young.) [1]

Until now, I had not linked the ascendancy of DuBoeuf and its familiar lite style (tending at the time in the US to crowd out better-established and, some felt, better, Beaujolais, for example) with the rise of "numerical" critics, besides parallel timing. I'm finding the preceding posters' remarks thought-provoking. (By the way, I hope some of you have seen Stevenson's treatment of "bubble-gum" or "banana" Beaujolais in his "Sotheby 's" wine encyclopedia -- "The amount of antipathy, even in Burgundy, to this style of Gamay ...")

-- Max

-- [1] We all have our passions, and a few years ago I assembled recommendations for a couple of hundred classic movies (a passion of mine), by request. I also sent a few of them to amazon.com as "customer reviews" and _Z_ was one of those. I thought that someone reading this far might appreciate the explanation, though the connection to wine is perhaps tenuous. Still more so are those for anecdotes I posted lately to sci.electronics.design on the "Pandora's Volt Incident" and the remarkable "Destruct-O-Tron" in the UK, but connections do exist, especially in the last case, which may be compared to the much less dramatic "magnetic" products recently advertised for placement under wine bottles.