…. and the reasons that I, and so many others love wine.
Here’s the thing …. the humble grape does magical things when you ferment it. It manages to morph in to a completely different fruit. In fact, it’s pretty much the only fruit that does it.
Take Sauvignon Blanc for example. It’s a grape. It tastes and smells like a grape when it’s hanging on the vine. Ferment one grown in the Loire Valley in France and it’ll smell of gooseberries and ferment one grown in Marlborough, New Zealand and it’ll smell of passion fruit and mango. It’s a whole fruit salad with pretty much only one aroma and flavour missing – a grape.
It's the same with every grape variety I can think of with one notable exception – Muscat. Grab a glass of Muscat and you’ll definitely know it’s made from grapes.
I’ll qualify this though with a few other fermented fruits. Give me a cider and I can taste apples (or pears if it’s a pear cider), a strawberry wine and I can taste strawberries etc etc but ferment a grape and you get all sorts.
I grew up watching Oz Clarke and Jilly Goulden on telly gabbling on about all these crazy smells and flavours they were getting from their wines. I was fascinated. So fascinated of course that I had to buy, taste then topple over pretty much everything they recommended but I also had a crack at a bit of DIY wine making. A few exploding demi Johns later I was still far away from making something that smelt of Oz’s boot or Jilly’s bra strap but I could definitely tell that my Strawberry wine all over the floor still smelt of strawberries.
So how does the grape do this. I learned this during one of the short windows of academic career when I was actually paying attention …..
The humble grape has an enormous array of chemical compounds that get unlocked during the fermentation process – esters, pyrazines, terpenes, thiols, lactones and many more for all you budding scientists out there. These compounds are shared with other fruits, hence sometimes you get strawberries, sometimes grapefruit and sometimes Granny’s fruity knicker drawer. Add to that all the variables a wine maker can throw at their fermenting must to pronounce some flavours, inhibit others and tweak the eventual result and you can get a right concoction of deliciousness. Even starting right at the beginning and choosing certain clones of certain grape varietals makes a big difference.
It really is a science but I’ve yet to come across a wine grower in Marlborough, New Zealand who’s managed to make a half drinkable wine that hasn’t got just a hint of either Passion Fruit or Mango. Likewise, a Pinot Noir from Chile that doesn’t have a smack of strawberries, a Shiraz from Barossa that doesn’t smell of Blackcurrant, nor a Merlot from California that doesn’t hint of plum.