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| Many of us in the wine trade use the term “minerality” when describing the character of certain wines, and we use it with regularity. It is, admittedly, not a term that we use with great precision, and yet if we were forbidden by pursed-lipped logical positivists from employing terms that were less than precise, I don’t suppose that we would have that much of interest to say about wine, much less to one another. In the trade, we are encouraged to draw upon a constrained lexicon when describing wine, and the repetition and discipline of tasting, taking notes that use this constrained lexicon, and then tasting again indoctrinates and inculcates a way of experiencing and thinking about what we put in our mouth. Minerality is not one of the terms we are taught to use, and yet I find it a useful if loose adjective that helps make sense of something that I, and apparently many other folks in the wine trade, experience with frequency when tasting wine. Serious-minded colleagues in the trade love to deride minerality, they love to raise their sigils of Cartesian certainty and dismiss it with glib handwave, sputtering “you cannot possibly taste minerals in a wine, you fool, because minerals, especially in the quantity that may be in a wine, have no taste at all.” I accept that minerals in the soil do not make their way into a finished wine in sufficient quantities to be organoleptically significant but knowing this does not make me stop using minerality. I do not know what these serious-minded folks do with the noetics of wine tasting when they are confronted with a wine that for the mere mortal sloppy minded rest of us, is incontrovertibly mineral, e.g., a bone-dry Muscadet or unoaked Chablis from a cool vintage, Txakolina, &, etc. My only guess is that they are doing it wrong. I think part of the problem lies in the poverty of terms with which we describe the textures that our mouths experience. If you look at a typical wine tasting note you will see flavor cognates such as blackberry, cherry, and tobacco used with abandon, but very little about how wines feel in your mouth – we sometimes use the odious phrase “mouthfeel,” a phrase nearly without indexicality. I don’t accept mouthfeel: we never comment with regards to a Mahler symphony about its ear hear; or about the nose smell of night-blooming jasmine or the finger touch of an alpaca wool sweater. For me, minerality is primarily a textural phenomenon, but given the impoverished state of our mouth texture vocabulary is it any wonder that we are often confused as to what it means? Today, we are tasting four wines that are, among other things, mineral. They grow on varied soils, and are made from different grapes, and originate from different sensibilities. They are, by my lights, incontrovertibly mineral. |
| Sylvain Martinez “RosaBul” Vin de France rose pet-nat 2018 Claire Naudin “Le Clou 34” Vin de France aligoté 2017 Ĉotar Teran Slovenia 2015 Girolamo Russo “Feudo” Etna Rosso 2016 |