RITUALS OF WINE: Advanced

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Tasting Acidity

One of the most important aspects of the wine you drink is acidity.  The right acidity in a wine gives it crispness and zip.  In grape growing, there are two main things that concern us as winemakers: sweetness and acidity.  An overripe grape is unappealing because it has been left so long that the sugar levels have gone up whilst the acid levels have gone down so far that the resulting flavours are bland and unappealing.

On the simplest level, as grapes ripen, two things happen:  sugar levels go up and acid levels go down.  The art is to pick the grape at the right levels of sugar and acid so that the resulting wine is balanced.  What we want to do, however, is leave the grapes hanging as long as possible so that complex and interesting characters develop.  This is what the Americans refer to as “hang time.”  As the grapes are left to ripen, the sugar levels go up and harvest must occur before the acid levels come down too far.  For white wines especially, acidity is the one key to a long lived wine.

The most common acid in a wine is tartaric acid.  Indeed, when we take the wine out of barrel, white tartaric acid crystals often form on the inside of the barrels as the wine dries out on the wood.  The Cream of Tartar that you buy in shops used to be collected from scrapings of the inside of wine barrels.

High acid wines are often from:

• vineyards that have less sunshine because they are more southerly (or, in the northern hemisphere, more northerly),
• grapes that were not picked fully ripe,
• years where there was not enough sunshine to fully ripen the grapes, or
• acid was added to the wine in the winery.
  - Acid additions are often made in warm area vineyards because the natural acid in the grapes fell too rapidly because of the heat.

Exercise: How to Detect Acid

The easiest way to train your palate to detect the subtleties of acid is to place something high in acid in a glass and sniff it.  Lemon juice or vinegar will do for this exercise.  Sip it carefully and notice which part of your tongue is most sensitive to the acidity.  It should be the edges of your tongue.  Memorise these parts of your tongue as your “acid detectors” for future wine tasting.

Exercise: Familiarising Yourself with the Different Types of Acid Found in Wine

For a basic idea of the different types of acid you will encounter in wine, line up the following and familiarize yourself with the sensations of each on your tongue:

For the winemaker, a great part of the art is balancing the sugar and acid.  Wines that are too high in acid taste “green” in winemaking parlance.  White wines require noticeable acidity because we expect them to be refreshing to taste. 

High acid white wines are called “crisp”, whereas white and red wines with too little acid are called “flabby”.  A sweet wine that does not have enough acid is called “cloying.”