Wine Lessons: How To Differentiate Good From Bad Wine (Part 2/3)

Part Two - Bouquet and Typicity (Part 2/2)
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"BOUQUET" is a wine jargon that refers to a complex mixture of smells exuding from a well-aerated glass of fine wine. In youth, wine gives out an array of linear aromas characterized by fruit, flower, food and herbs scents. With age, everything simmers down to rich collage of scents that form one integrated masterpiece of a perfume.

It really isn't necessary to dissect the smell of a wine to form your judgment of its quality.

But a good bouquet has to be clean, attractive, rich and free of unnecessary distraction.

Wine writers like to describe scents using "notes" of flowers (violets), fruit (raspberries, lemon, apple, pear), food (mushroom) and spice (cinnamon, vanilla).

Some common flaws that are easily detectable by the nose are: excessive alcohol, volatile acidity - vinegar - and sulfur dioxide. The term "oakiness" is used quite often to describe a flaw caused by over use of oak barrel ageing.

The oak scent dominates the bouquet - not good because we want to smell the wine not the wood in which it was aged.

Contrary to popular belief, the "flavor" of wine is 75% smell and 25% taste. Indeed for those who must keep alcohol intake to a bare minimum, just by using your nose, you get 75% of the kicks.

You can still taste by spitting instead of swallowing, you get 90-95% of the real thing. Considering that the average "normal" wine drinker gulps down 90% of his/her wine with less than 5% in discernment, you probably get more bang-for-the-buck than the lot of them all the time.

Typicity

A good wine can't ever be great unless it vividly demonstrates pedigree of region, climate and style. To illustrate the point, let' say we have big Pinot Noir, very concentrated with rich flavors. It tastes like a Shiraz and is great with a piece of rare red meat. All in all, it is a very good bottle of red wine, but it is not a great Pinot Noir wine. The delicate Pinot characteristics are totally masked out by its high alcohol content. When we order a Pinot Noir, a Morey-St.-Denis from Burgundy for example, we expect to find certain qualities unique to wines made from this grape, not just another generic red wine of good quality.

To judge the typicality of a wine, some knowledge of style of regions is needed to form a basis for our judgment. For varietal wines - wines that are classified by its principle grape such as Merlot or Chardonnay for example - knowledge on the characteristics of wine made from that grape is necessary. A number of (future) lessons are devoted to providing you this information. If you really need to know now, you can always buy a "Grape poster" for each of your favorite varietals - Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz, Sauvignon Blanc for example. There are about 60 of them but your average wine drinker is only interested in a dozen or two.

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Source: How To Differentiate Good From Bad Wine