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| Picariello Fiano Irpinia 2022 $27 Passo delle Tortore “Le Archaie” Greco di Tufo 2022 $44 Centopassi “Rocce di Pietra Longa” Grillo 2022 Sicilia $27 Mortellito “Tuttu” Terre Siciliane 2022 $26 Manenti Frappato Vittoria 2022 $38 |
| Italian wine folks use the term “sapidità” to describe the saltiness of a wine, particularly the dry white wines from the Tyrrhenian seacoast of their country of which we are tasting but a small sampling of tonight. Here in the States the cognate “sapidity” has little currency or indexicality and when it is used, it is only as a bland statement that something is “tasty.” In the States we tend to use the word “salty” to refer to sapidità and while saltiness is an undeniable note of certain wines, what in the hell do we mean by it?
At the simplest level, a salty wine seems to taste a bit like a very minerally mineral water, such as Gerolsteiner. It’s more than the real or imagined taste of minerals, but also a mouthwatering quality, too. Sadly, the concentration of mineral salts found in even the saltiest of wines is insufficient to cross through the threshold of the doors of perception. The naïve empiricist, redolent of mildew and naphthalene and always very much fun at parties, will at once raise his index finger (yes, they’re always guys) and insist, “well, actually, you cannot taste minerals in wine as minerals are never in sufficient concentration to be organoleptically significant.” At that point, all the air has left the room, and you may as well grab your hat and leave for home. The empiricist stamps his feet and demands that we ground every statement we make about a wine (or anything at all) in factual truth statements about a wine and because we cannot taste salt in wine, referring to a wine as salty amounts to gibberish, and you’re a numpty for believing otherwise. As a devout rationalist, I accept that there many things, most things, and perhaps the most important things, that are difficult to pin down in this way—minerality is another such bugaboo of the ruggedly tough-minded wine empiricist, a descriptor that I and many other wine folk use minerality to report on what we experience with certain wines, for example, a cool-vintage aligoté from Burgundy, or a monovarietal xarel·lo from Penedes, unoaked Chablis, or a bottle of ice-cold Muscadet, the latter preferably accompanied by a platter of raw oysters on a bed of cracked ice. So, without yet knowing the underlying chemistry that produces saltiness in wine, I give you permission to use salty whenever you like and when the empiricist begins to raise his finger, stop him in his tracks with a derisive laugh, grunt, “no,” and find someone more interesting to talk to at the party. |