Do you put blueberries in your wine?
05/02/2018
Do you put blueberries in your wine?
Wine flavors 101 - Have you ever wondered why wine smells (and tastes) like virtually every fruit in the book, except for grapes? Or how a wine can smell like cedar and taste like cherries or blueberries?
Welcome to the world of stereoisomers. Stereoisomers are merely different configurations of the same chemical compound. For example, two common scents in Cabernet Sauvignon are anise and blackberries. So has the winemaker added licorice or blackberries to the fermentation mix? No. Aside from the true fruit wines, like strawberry wine or cherry wine, conventional wine is made solely from grapes. That's it. So where are these other scents, flavors and sometimes off the wall descriptions coming from? The answer is climate and fermentation. In the fermentation process, the yeast eats the grape sugar and converts it to alcohol and in the process literally thousands of various, complex chemical compounds are also formed. It is these ubiquitous compounds that take on similar molecular arrangements to familiar scents that our nose and brain can categorize - i.e. apple, butter, cherry and the like. In addition, the climate plays a critical role in the development of the individual grape clusters and their innate flavor profiles. For example, a wine's style will be completely different depending on where it was grown. Take a Cabernet Sauvignon, for example, one grown in a cooler region and one grown in a warm sunny, locale. What happens to the grapes? In the cooler areas the Cab grapes will often display tart, tight flavors like that of red cherries or currants; however, grapes grown in warmer climates present juicier fruit, like that of plums, strawberries, raspberries and blackberries as a direct result of ripeness levels based on sun exposure. The differences in smell and flavor are what makes it fun to taste wines at a winery where you can experience the subtle differences in location and climate. Cheers!
Post By:
Allison VanArnam