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| Château de Minière “Bulles de Minière” Bourgueil NV /$24 Calmette “Trespotz” Cahors 2021 /$35 Korab “Karmazin” Czechia 2021 /$38 Bott-Frigyes Kékfrankos 2022 / $37 Deperu Holler “Familia” Isola dei Nauraghi Sardinia 2022 /$28 |
| This week’s tasting focuses on what makes red wine red, namely, anthocyanins. Anthocyanins are naturally occurring hydrocarbon-based compounds found across the plant kingdom; with grapes, for the most part, they form in the skins as the juice of most red grapes is, surprisingly, clear (there are a handful of red grape varieties with red juice but we’re not tasting “teinturier” grapes this week), and it is only through maceration with the skins of the grapes that pigments are extracted. Anthocyanins are also a natural antioxidant and are responsible for the purported health benefits of drinking red wine, though color me unconvinced, but if you like scientistic fairy tales, you do you.
Anthocyanins themselves contribute little to the flavor of wines, though they do associate with other compounds and can exhibit organoleptic properties. What they definitively do contribute to is our perception of red wine through a form of selection bias. When we look at a deeply pigmented, nearly black, red wine, it is not wrong to suspect that the wine will itself be full-bodied, deeply flavored, and full of dark red fruit flavors, but that is not quite right. With a deep, dark red wine, I expect a Morton’s Steak House father knows best experience, redolent of cavendish tobacco, overripe fruit, and gout. I admit to an atavistic adoration of black cherries, and although my stoner days of eating McDonald’s hot cherry pies or worse, scooping goopy spoonfuls of tinned, cornstarch-y cherries directly from the can and into my mouth, are long over, I feel saddened and empty when all-to-brief cherry season is over. And so, when I look at a darkly pigmented red wine, I expect the wine to behave in a certain predictable way, and when it does not, I am confounded, but also happy. Painted wings and giants’ rings make way for other toys. In the Middle Ages wine drinkers prized the malbec-centric red wines of Cahors, a town in the southwest of France, for their dark colors, and the wines were known as the “black wines” of Cahors. Malbec does have a fair amount of anthocyanin in its skins, but perhaps no more than cabernet– it’s also a thin skinned grape and the traditional vinification technique involves essentially beating the shit out of the grapes during fermentation, extracting even more pigment (but also tannin) and yielding a densely pigmented “black” wine (to complicate matters even further, these so-called black wines were likely vin cuit – boiled, concentrated red wines which the Bordelaise, downstream, loved to exploit to give color to their wan-colored Claret). Today, there’s a new generation of Cahors growers such as Maya Sallée and Nicolas Fernandez of Domaine la Calmette (we are tasting one of their stellar Cahors tonight) who, realizing that the malbec grape is thin-skinned but also tannic, treat their grapes gently so as not to extract too much tannin, and there is still plenty of pigment to go around. |