Tonight is a Good Night to Drink Wine

The latest edition of the wonderful Cellier Magazine (published in both French and English by the SAQ – Société des Alcools du Québec) has a fascinating article about good days and bad days to drink wine. No, I mean good and bad days for the wine.

Regular readers will know that I’m a fan of Biodynamic wines, without necessarily won over by the whole of Biodynamic philosophy.

I’ve heard before that Biodynamics proposes wines will taste better on certain days. According to the Biodynamic calendar, wines are open and show best on “fruit days” and “flower days”. In contrast, wines are closed and flat on “root days”. Older wines show best on “leaf days”.

Go ahead and scoff but, as the Cellier article points out, two huge English wine retailers – Marks & Spencer and Tesco – have wine tastings only on “fruit days”.

The downside? The Biodynamic calendar determines these days by the moon’s phases and astrological influences, so it’s certainly out there. And, unfortunately, the days run in bunches. So, this month, root days (bad) run from the first to the third – whew, that’s out of the way – and then the 10th, 11th, 20th, 21st, 29th and 30th. Maybe that’s Mother Nature’s way of telling us to dry out?

You can buy a Biodynamic wine-drinking calendar (When Wine Tastes Best – 2011) for about $8 from Amazon.ca and there are free Biodynamic calendars on-line (the article cites two sources).

Codswallop? Could be…but who knows? Maybe I’ll start checking the correlation between my less than stellar (yes, pun intended) wine experiences with Biodynamic root days.

And for a sceptic’s view on the moon's effect on wine appreciation, check out Alder Yarrow’s post.

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Winning By A Nose!

After 4 weeks of laryngitis, a cold, blocked sinuses, bronchitis, antibiotics...I can smell again!  What a treat...it's like discovering wine anew!

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13.5 Is The New 12.5

In our sommelier courses, they taught us that 12.5% Alcohol by Volume (ABV) is the mid-range for table wines. (12.5% is also known as Bordeaux weight, as Bordeaux wines traditionally came in at that level of alcohol.) Moreover, our Profs consider a wine at 12.5% ABV to be medium-bodied. (Body is the perception of weight in a wine.  Alcohol contributes more to that perception than any other element in the wine. More alcohol means fuller-bodied.) At or below 11% is light-bodied and a wine at or above 14% is full-bodied. (Like my Profs, I’m drawing these boundaries somewhat arbitrarily.)
But that’s not true anymore. Over the past 20 years, alcohol levels have gradually increased to higher and higher levels. Why? One factor is the slavish consumer following devoted to some wine critics whose personal preference is for deep purple, big fruit, oaky, full-bodied (high alcohol) wines. Climate change is another factor, as grapes consistently reach full ripeness with higher sugar levels, which converts to alcohol through fermentation. In fact, these days many wines go through alcohol reduction to get under the legal limit for table wines in various jurisdictions.

So, in today’s wine universe, 13.5% is the new 12.5%, the new midpoint. And when I look at most of the selections rolling through Vintages these days, 13.5% is certainly the mid-point. Might be even higher.

Why am I going on about alcohol levels? Thanks to my horrific summer cold that just won’t go away, I’m still without my sense of smell. (Jeez, this better be temporary!) But as I said last week, without the ability to get aromas and flavours in wine, my focus goes to other factors, like body and the sensation of alcohol.

In almost all of the fuller-bodied wines (above 14%) that I’ve tasted in the last 3 weeks, the sensation of heat from alcohol prevails. Sometimes it’s even a burning sensation. Why didn't I notice this before? I think that the (usually) powerful aromas and flavours in full-bodied wines tend to mask that sensation of alcohol. Take those aromas and flavours away and the hot punch of too high (?) alcohol is obvious. (I’ll admit that the aromas and flavours would not divert a more discerning taster than me.)

For me, I’m going to pay more attention to the presence of that hot alcoholic sensation in full-bodied wines (>14.5%) from now on. And I’m going to look for wines that keep those alcohol levels down. I don’t want to feel the burn anymore.

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Losing By A Nose

Wine is a spectacular sensory experience. Sight, smell, taste, touch…it’s all there except for sound. (I’m not counting hallucinations.)

But there’s one sense that’s pre-eminent for wine appreciation: smell. Without aromas and flavours (and we smell flavours, we don’t taste them), wine is stripped of much sensory pleasure.

The dread of losing that sense of smell, even temporarily because of illness, was the cause of nightmares for many students in our sommelier program, where blind tastings were part of every examination, and examinations seem to come around every 2 weeks.

That dread has come back to me over the past few days as I impatiently fight my way through a nasty end-of-summer cold, with a complete loss of the sense of smell.

The cliché seems to be true, though: loss of one sense heightens the others. (Yes, I’m still drinking wine during the cold; it’s habit-forming.) So without a sense of smell, appreciation of wine changes its focus to other characteristics:

• Appearance: What colour is it?  How deep is the colour?  Is it crystal clear or cloudy?
• Structure: Is it dry? sweet? Is the acidity high or low?  What about the tannins?
• Texture (with your tongue): Weight...is it light-bodied or full-bodied? Mouthfeel?  What sensations do you get?  Smooth or grippy?  Crisp or flabby?   

For me, aromas and flavours usually overwhelm these other significant elements of wine appreciation. But without the ability to smell, they all become surprisingly easy to pick out accurately. And you’re not misled by preconceptions from tasting other wines with a similar aroma profile (for example, citrus = light-bodied...often true, but not always).

It’s been an interesting lesson. But I want my nose back! Speaking of which, time to blow it….







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