Harry Haddon’s Incomplete And Unofficial Guide To The Hedonistic Pleasures Of The Grape
Chapter Two: What the hell is in my glass?
Download Real Time Wine & register to join the community!I hope I convinced you in the first chapter of this series that the pursuit of sublime pleasure and blind drunkenness through wine is a worthwhile, and proper one. Better than a similar pursuit through spirits, beer, cider, or, god forbid, water. That being decided on, in this chapter I want to focus on the next very important step in loving wine, tasting and difference.
At University I drank cases and cases of Nederberg Baronne. When it was on special I carried out as much as my little bank account could bear. I glugged it heartily until I could not stand, and today have absolutely no idea what it tasted like.
The first flirtations, eyelash fluttering’s, and knowing glances of an affair with wine begin with your first real taste. Let me tell you how this happened for me.
It was at a small wine course. I was there due to the absence of a stationary salesman. Fortunately for me stranded in Bloemfontein over an eraser shortage, or was it a glut of sharpeners? I don’t know, but the end result was a mutual friend invited me to take his place.
That evening four small glasses, each about two fingers full of red wine, were poured for me. A new experience; I was used to a more linear style of drinking – four bottles one after the other was the norm, having them together a new idea entirely. It was to prove a revelation.
All the wines were made from Pinotage grapes, grown in Stellenbosch, and picked in the same vintage. I held up the first glass and giving it a jittery, unconfident swirl, lifted it to my nose. I took a deep sniff. I smelt . . . wine.
I took the next glass and repeated the swirl and brought it to my nose. Sniff: wine.
The third. Swirl. Sniff: wine. And the fourth. Swirl. Sniff: wine.
Then the revelation: they were all different.
I could no more describe the differences than I could write a Chinese rock opera. Each one smelt like wine, but different wine.
I reeled. What did this mean? Why the hell were they all so different? I went back to smell again, and taste. Like a person struggling to learn a new language, and with my tongue sticking out the corner of my mouth I tried to write down what I smelled and tasted.
Perhaps you have noticed I didn’t ask myself if I liked the wine or not? I was too interested in the whole ‘what the fuck, where fore, what too’ of it all. Knowing what you like is good, but you shouldn’t become blinded by it. Tastes are ephemeral. Like days in the middle of summer when the heat feels infinite, and a chilly winter morning is almost inconceivable. What you like now may feel concrete and sturdy, but it will change. When it does it will be like leaving the house on that freezing winter morning and wondering wistfully how summer vanished so quickly.
Wine is about difference, not preference. Preference is easy: you like something or you don’t. Difference is complicated, interesting, complex. So how do we go about finding the difference?
Harry’s quick guide to getting wine from the glass to your belly.
Into whatever clear receptacle you have chosen to drink out of, pour a little wine. Is it clear or cloudy? A dark, impenetrable purple, or a light brick red? Shiningly clear with a fleck of green, or a golden, glistening yellow?
Do not be concerned just yet as to the meanings of these colourful messages. First just look at them, and try to describe them.
Give your receptacle a swirl. When we talk about flavour we are really talking about aroma. It’s your nose – or rather the olfactory bulb - that does the hard work. The tongue is a relatively lazy organ that sticks to sweet, salty, sour and bitterness. A wine’s aroma is made up of hundreds and thousands of different flavour compounds. So “the trick”, as the august Oxford Companion to Wine suggests, “is to persuade as many flavour compounds as possible to vaporize and come into contact with the olfactory bulb.”
Your swirling aids this vaporization. After you have swirled, this vaporized invisible cloud of aroma sits in the bowl of the glass – the reason why you have not filled it to the brim – ready for your nostrils to vacuum them up to that old factory bulb.
Now taste. Here is where the texture of the wine is felt. Acidity – which stimulates the saliva glands; tannins – that dry out your mouth; residual sugar which rounds and fattens the wine; viscosity – is the texture closer to water or honey? And alcohol – do you feel the warming glow of alcohol, or is it a rough, rasping heat?
Then you swallow or spit depending on your conditions and preference. Check to see how long the aromas, textures and flavours play out in your mouth. Do they disappear quickly like a jilted lover, or do they stay and develop, twist and change, leading you down the garden path, out the back gate to somewhere new?
This is where it all begins, and ends really. There is much more to learn about wine, but it inevitably leads back to this simple interaction.
Here’s the homework. Open four bottles of wine, all red or all white. Pour them out into four glasses, and go through this process. Don’t try to find which is the best wine, but all the ways in which they are different. Write these down. Be creative, free, and imaginative.
The hardest part of wine is talking about it. We are constrained by language. Mere words and phrases to discuss and communicate something that is wholly outside language. This is also, however, part of the fun.
Next week we are going to look at a few practical ways to make this process yield the best results.
Harry.
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