It's all in the balance...

Last night, I decided to relax and catch some Jazz at the Backstage Bar at Theater Square in downtown Pittsburgh. I sipped a martini while I perused the small wine list, and immediately gravitated to the 2003 Bourgogne Pinot Noir from Joesph Faiveley. Just a standard, every day Red Burgundy, just what I wanted and at $7 a glass it wouldn't break the bank. The aromatic profile of the wine was just beautiful - a melange of red cherries and raisins. Real pretty. The problem came when I took the first sip as the tannins immediately parched my palate, prompting me to order a club soda just to scrape the wine from my tongue.

Wine has to be in balance. There's a lot of combinations that will make for a balanced wine, but what does that mean. Emile Peynaud's The Taste of Wine is a seminal book that is as influential now as it was when it was first written over thirty years ago. I do warn that this book is more than a bit technical from time to time, but there are important parts that will be understandable to all. Particularly interesting is his rather extensive treatment of how to write a tasting note. And for our purposes, the parts where he discusses balance.

In a nut shell a balanced wine follows the equation:

Acidity + Tannin => Sugar + Alcohol.

There are a few corollaries that result from this equation. Namely that if there is a lot of tannin in the wine, there shouldn't be a lot of acidity, and it certainly needs to be offset by either sugar or a good dose of alcohol. Why alcohol? I'm so glad you asked. :)

Alcohol has an apparent sweetness to the palate. Most people don't realize it but it's true. The easiest way to prove this (if you're either a real go-getter or the scientific type or both) is to set up this little experiment. Boil the alocohol out of glass of wine. Run it through glass tubing and into a beaker. When all the alcohol has boiled out replace the same amount of water into the wine as the amount of alcohol that came out. The result: the wine will be unbearably bitter, either too tannic or too acidic or both. That's because when the alcohol is in the wine, it's apparent sweetness balances the wine. Without it, the wine is plonk.

Many people criticise California wines for being too alcoholic, and it's true that some are. But in the best California wines, elevated alcohol can still make for a balanced wine - all you need is the appropriate level of tannin or acidity to work in concert with it. Conversely, if there's a lot of tannin in the wine (something that will happen naturally when it's warm out because the skins of the grapes thicken and that's where the tannin is), the wine requires high alcohol, or else it will become to tough to drink - a problem that occurred in the heat wave of 2003 in France - the very problem that tainted my experience with Faiveley's Bourgogne. It's all about the balance.

My Pick for the Year's Best Wine Book

I thought I'd take a moment since we're at year's end/beginning to highlight my favorite wine book from last year, Matt Kramer's New California Wine: Making Sense of Napa Valley, Sonoma, Central Coast, and Beyond. I first picked this book up in I believe late January last year, and I don't think that I've set it down since.

What makes Kramer's book different from the scores of other California Wine books that are available? The pimary difference is that rather than simply offering page after page of endless tasting notes, Kramer's book educates the reader. Karmer sets the tone with his entertaining first section (around 50 pages in all) entitled "Thinking California". Not a history in the traditional sense of the world, Kramer contrasts the California winemaking mindset with that of Europe, tracing the overall mentality from the industrial wineries of the past to today's cult wines.

Kramer then takes the reader through each of California's major wine regions. He looks at each region as terroir unto itself and is refreshingly frank in telling the reader whether or not this approach can be justified or not with regards to each region. In some cases, Kramer willingly admits that the region in question is merely a geographic deignation with wines of no particular distinguishing characteristics. When it is justified, Kramer takes a closer look at wines of more refinement. In addition, Kramer profiles the finest wineries, putting them of course in the context of the terroir in which they produce wine.

Overall, Kramer's New California Wine is a must-have for any serious wine lover and is written with his classic, amusing, accesible words that have made him one of America's favorite wine writers.