David has been reading some interesting books and is musing about the nature of wines. This is the second in a three part series on the major components of great wines, tannin, acid, and fruit. Today’s topic is fruit.
Fruit is one of the three most important elements to evaluate when judging the quality of a wine, along with tannins (see tannin blog here) and acidity. The acidity and fruit are really kind of inseparable; two sides of the same coin, if you will. Finding the perfect balance between the three is the key to making or identifying what is truly a great wine.
Before discussing the relationship between fruit and acidity, let's dive deeper into the elements of fruit. The grape itself, depending on the variety and where it is grown, can have many fruit expressions. The term fruit-forward or “fruity” is often mistaken for sweetness by new wine drinkers, but it’s important to consider all the faces of the word “fruity.” Indeed, you’ve likely tasted tart, somewhat sour, or slightly underripe fruits. These are all fair descriptors of the fruit flavors found in grapes. Wine, like coffee, can have many subtle expressions that lead to many of those flowery, critical reviews of wine, “notes of dried apricot, with a caramelly finish. It has aromas of peach flower and acacia.” There are very few other things that we eat or drink that are described using other foods.
When was the last time you tasted a tomato and said it has flavors of Cabernet and wild blackberry? You don’t—it’s just a good or a bad tomato. A lot of pressure has been put on the tiny grape.
Grapes naturally contain sugars—fructose and glucose, to be exact. But flavors come from aromatic compounds in the grape that are amplified by sweetness, and our brains want to take a shortcut and say, since we know ripe strawberries are sweet, this rosé must be too. So, it’s important to know that a fruity wine does not necessarily imply a sweet wine. In fact, most of the wine we drink in the US is classified as “dry.” So, how much residual sugar can be in a wine to be classified as “dry?”
First, let’s define residual sugar. As grapes ripen, the sugars increase during the sunny summer days, and more importantly, the ratio of acid and sugar to water changes. During the fermentation process, where the juice becomes wine, yeasts devour the sugar, converting it into alcohol. The more sugar, the higher the alcohol. This is why higher alcohol wines often have the perception of sweetness when very little sugar remains. The remaining sweetness or “residual sugar” determines whether a wine is dry or not.
Generally, anything below 9 or 10 grams per liter would be considered dry, but I call anything over 5 g/L off-dry. Some people say dry is less than 1 gram per liter. But since I’m writing this, I’m going to use my standards: under 5 g/L is dry and above that is off-dry (meaning just a touch of sweetness is perceptible) until you get to true sweet wines. To give you a sense of other beverages, whole milk contains 50 g/L of sugar; predictably, orange juice has more at 90 g/L, and Coca-Cola has over 100 g/L. By comparison, the wine you drink has a good chance of being dry unless labeled as sweet or dessert wine.
Evaluating Fruit
Whether the wine is dry (most of the wine we consume in the US), off-dry, or sweet (above 20 g/L), fruit should be considered a characteristic independent of its sweetness.
Evaluating the fruit should begin with space, texture, weight, alcohol, and then color.
Space: How mouth-filling is the wine? Does the fruit cover your whole palate, or does it find itself toward the front of your tongue, or occupy the middle part and sides of your mouth?
Texture, weight, and alcohol: is the wine rich, juicy, succulent, thin, medium, heavy, viscous, or faint? Somewhat related to weight is alcohol. The perception of alcohol in a wine can be nonexistent in lighter wines, but it can be overbearing in heavier wines. Yet even higher alcohol wines can sometimes be hard to perceive if the accompanying parts of the wine—texture, weight, and acidity achieve a harmonious balance.
Color: Before associating specific flavors or fruits with your wine, we think of flavors in general categories. There is, of course, a fair amount of personal bias when tasting wines, and the notes are all somewhat subjective. Before jumping to notes of cherry, raspberry, or cranberry, we start by noting that the wine smells like red fruits. Before blueberries, prunes, and blackberries, we start with dark fruits or black/blue fruits. We start with yellow fruits before we identify apricots, peaches, or baked apples. With this method, we arrive at a flavor profile that a group can agree on and drill down from there. Or not, often it’s good enough to understand we are tasting pitted fruit notes in our wine!
The fruit characteristics of a great red wine will have tannins sewn into the fruit so seamlessly that the flavors and tannins seem to carry the same weight and are part of each other, making it difficult to think about each element separately. In fact, the greater the wine, the harder it is to define the specific notes. When balance in tannin and fruit is achieved, you need only for the acid to match to have before you a wine that transcends specific definable flavors.
And in the next installment, we will move on to the magic component that, in my opinion, is what ties everything together in all of the world’s greatest wines: acidity.
