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This summer at our local outdoor wine bar, we observed a young man, heavily tattooed and sporting the normcore look, ask for a wine "with more minerality. I asked my wife if Men's Health had recently done an article of how to order wine. She pointed our to me, kindly yet firmly, that young people get their cultural cues from podcasts. "Podcasts!", I said, finally seeing the light.
The term "minerality" pops up more and more these days. Minerality is practically on everyone’s lips. I’ve used the term myself. But what does it actually mean? If you were to ask everyone consistently what they mean by minerality, you’d probably get quite different answers. When I’ve used the term, I had a lovely image in my mind of a microscopically fine crystalline impression—something that wasn’t fruity but somehow stony in the mouth, like stream pebbles. Layer a few well-known factoids about soil composition on top of that association, like the blue and green slates of the Nahe, and suddenly—almost convincingly—everyone has slate in their mouths, slate in their noses, a grandiose minerality, and its superlative, "salty." Unfortunately, there is more to it than that.
Every soil contains minerals to some extent. However, there is no metabolic pathway in the vine that fully transports those minerals into the grapes—let alone in a concentration you could smell. The minerals in the soil don’t end up directly in the grape or the wine in their elemental form. They are absorbed as ions and contribute more to the vine’s nutrition than to the wine’s composition. The human sense of taste and smell is geared more toward organic compounds (e.g., esters, terpenes) than inorganic elements.
We can’t distinguish blue slate from green slate by taste, let alone by smell. The red earth of the Rhinefront doesn’t have a taste either. You can’t smell or taste the soil itself in the wine, even though terroir as a nexusof phenomena undeniably exists. Perhaps I’m too bloody-minded in trying to force the tautological difference between two claims: "I recognize the vineyard that is covered in slate" and "I taste the slate in the vineyard."🍷
Never mind. Whether semantically or substantively: you can’t smell the slate. The rock isn’t in your glass; it’s in your head.
More precisely: in your nose. Because at upwards of exactly 24 grams per litre of sugar-free extract, humans are physiologically capable of perceiving minerality through something called a “nosefeel.” Sugar-free extract is what remains when you remove the water from wine. These minerals are present in the form of salts (e.g., potassium bitartrate, potassium sulfate) or ions. Alongside these inorganic compounds, sugar-free extract also contains organic compounds like acids (e.g., tartaric acid, malic acid), phenols, glycerin, and other non-volatile substances. Minerals are part of the extract but account for only a small fraction of the total.
This extract coats the front nasal mucosa but not the aroma receptors. So, something is felt in the nose but not smelled. Often in the mouth you can feel a certain silkiness on your teeth. The pleasant sensation of minerality depends on the amount of acidity present, whether in wine or food. When salt (minerality) and acid are balanced, it feels appetizing and complex. A very mineral-driven wine is chemically buffered by acidic food. The acid resists the salt, so to speak. Conversely, an acidic wine—high in acidity but low in extract (minerality)—can be buffered by salty food. Good winemakers, good chefs, and sensory experts know how to achieve this. They know what to do to make us all exclaim, "how delicious!"
🍷 Do we have the sensory and evaluative expertise needed to reliably and consistently distinguish between the wines of the Médoc and those of the Right Bank of Bordeaux? Can we easily distinguish Cabernet Sauvignon from cuvées made from Merlot and Cabernet Franc? Do we also understand the geological differences between the regions - the gravel and quartz of the Médoc with its ‘croupes,’ those unique hills of quartzite, granite and schist, in contrast to the clay and limestone of the Right Bank, interspersed with pockets of gravel and sand? Are we ready to project this knowledge onto our sensory experience and claim that we can not only recognise the terroir, but even ‘taste’ the gravel? Wouldn't that be a marvellous example of circular reasoning and confirmation bias? In formal logic, this fallacy does not yet have a name. If anyone would like to make a suggestion for the recursive attribution of knowledge to perceived phenomena - the mixing of the known and the observed to the detriment of objective understanding - then let's name it together.
