Defining Style & Quality, a Framework…

The more I study and teach about wine, the more I realise that a source of many complications and confusion for many wine students when it comes to wine appreciation is a general lack of a framework of thinking to approach their journey of discovery.  Many a wine lover readily (and perhaps prematurely) jumps from concepts to concepts in the hope that the accumulation of knowledge will help them understand wine more clearly.  Ironically, this often has the opposite effect causing more confusion and misunderstanding.

In this post, I want to propose an approach, a way of thinking that lays solid foundations upon which to rest the building blocks of wine knowledge and help to connect the dots more effectively.  My approach is not original. Many wine books and courses, such as the WSET, hint at it with more or less clarity.  However, few spell it out as clearly and emphasise as I do that without understanding this approach with absolute clarity, the understanding of wine will always be deficient.

My approach focuses first on understanding Style and Quality.  Notice that I did not write Grape, Terroir, or Winemaking.  No. I believe that we must understand precisely how to define style and quality before we embark on the journey to understand grape, terroir, and winemaking.  

The Source of Style & Quality...

For sure, and as we will see in future posts, the source of style and quality are the grape, the terroir (which I prefer to call "ripening conditions"), and the winemaking.  Therefore, studying these three concepts in great detail is necessary to understand wine.  However, I believe we must FIRST understand how to define Style and Quality for grape, terroir, and winemaking concepts to begin making sense.  When we confidently describe style and quality technically and objectively, I believe the dots of grapes, terroir and winemaking can be connected with more clarity and intelligibility.

Style, or the wine personality...

To me, style is the personality of the wine. Like the ballerina Darcey Bussell above, a wine can be mesmerising, ethereal and vibrant.  It can dance delicately on our palate yet show an underlying strength that is almost imperceptible, but one that we feel is present. Alternatively, like the many roles, Sophie Marceau interprets in her movies, the wine can be refined and elegant, with the poise of aristocracy and old worldliness. At other times, Michele Yeoh, who was once a bond girl, performed many of her stunts, especially those of the martial arts.  She is powerful yet lean and feminine.  Just like these three performers, different wines have entirely different personalities.  

The Key is to experience wine for its personality first and foremost.  Only then can we decide on its quality.  Only wines of the same styles can be compared with each other.  A Prosecco will never be a Champagne.  And vice versa.  Therefore, reaching each and claiming that one is better than the other is incorrect.  The personality of the wine can also guide us in pairing it with our food or mood.  Do I feel for something light and refreshing or something creamy and comforting?  Is the wine powerful and dense to match a delicious roast, or is it dry and lively to check the beautiful oysters in front of me?  When we know how to define the style, we can be bolder in our experiments with wine, even when we have not tasted the wines of our temptations.  When I tell the sommelier that I love Pinot Grigio from Collio, he might advise me to taste a wine from Rias Baixas and be confident that I will love it just as much.  The key to understanding the wine's personality is to describe it with the help of a method.

More precisely, a framework to approach Style would accurately describe the key element’s key elements.  To that end, we need to focus on its weight, structure, texture, aromatics and winemaking characteristics.

In order, wine style can be defined ad Body, Structure, Texture, Aromas & Flavours, and unique characteristics.

The weight of the wine is how heavy or light it feels on the palate as we swirl it around our mouth.  Does it feel fluid like water or creamy like, well, cream?  The structure relates to its components, such as acidity, tannins, sugar, and alcohol.  Are these components delicate and subtle, or are they pronounced and extreme? The texture is often overlooked.  Yet, it has such an essential role in the wine's personality.  Does the wine feel soft or hard?  Are the tannins sandy or silky? Does the interplay of acidity and creaminess give the wine and 3-D sensation on the palate at once refreshing and caressing?  The aromas are so crucial in revealing the personality of the wine.  It is delicate or intense; is it floral or fruity?  Mineral or aged? And what to make of the winemaking? Does the wine have the vibrancy of its production in stainless steel, or does it have the creaminess of ageing in oak barrels for an extended period?

The definitions of wine style suggested here is very much compatible with the WSET Systematic Approach to Tasting…

More specifically, the weight of the wine is directly proportional to its fruit concentration (or its fleshiness) and its alcohol.  Its structure relates to its weight, acidity, tannins and sugars.  The texture depends on its feeling on the gums, the tongue, and the roof of the mouth.  Aromas come from 3 sources, the primary family from the grape itself, the secondary family from winemaking, and the tertiary family from maturation in bottle.  The wine can have extra distinctions mostly from the winemaking itself or whether it is modern or classic and sometimes can relate to its ageing potential.

When we understand how to define the style, we can begin to draw in our mind a map of the world of wine and then pinpoint where each wine we taste fits it.  As we increase our experience of various world wines and map them in our mind, we realise that a particular style is more to our liking than another.  We also realise that wines can be grouped into four broad families for white and four general families for red.

The definition of wine style as applied to cool vs warm climate…

Quality, or the measure of excellence...

Quality is an altogether different concept.  If the style is the personality of the wine, then quality is its measure of excellence.  From the moment the buds break from the vines in the spring until the wine is bottled, sometimes years afterwards, many decisions will have been taken, and many factors could have influenced the excellence of the wine. Years and years of refinement will often be necessary to produce a truly outstanding wine when the magical combination of vine age, perfect ripening conditions, and highly skilled handling in the cellar will come together in a beautiful whole.

However, it must be clear from the outset that a winemaker begins the season knowing fairly precisely which style of wine they will produce at the end of the vintage.  No matter how much we talk about terroir and vintage variation, it will be known in advance that this plot of that one can only produce this style or that style.  A village wine will always be a village wine, no matter the quality of the vintage.  Therefore we must understand that wine production is more precise than we are often led to believe, and style is the starting point for everything.  Once we know that the wine is made with a target style, we can assess the quality.

Personality and excellence are two different concepts, and surprisingly, many wine experts often confuse them.  As we have seen, Prosecco and Champagne are two different styles of wines altogether. So are village wines versus great CRU wines.  And so, we can not compare them against each other.  But we can compare each against their peers within their specific style and measure the quality achieved within the intended style.  Therefore, it is possible to have an outstanding quality Prosecco as it is to have a poor quality Champagne.

Ironically, for such a critical topic, it seems difficult to find consensus among wine professionals as to what constitutes quality.  Some MW students go as far as creating complicated acronyms for their exams, such as BLICTOAD.  However, for me, I believe that wine quality is more simple than that.

First and foremost, does the wine have complexity and purity?  That is the source of all pleasure.  Its bouquet is the most crucial factor that transports and makes us dream.  Is it simple or layered with various primary, secondary, and tertiary aromas? And even if the wine is made to be enjoyed young and fresh with primary and secondary aromas dominating, is it clean and pure with well-defined aromas that we should expect from its style? 

Once we are satisfied with its bouquet, we must concern ourselves with the balance of its component’s structure.  Here, I refer to what Emile Peynaud calls the hardness of the wine caused by its acidity, tannins (for red), and co2 (for sparkling), which must be counterbalanced by its softness caused by its alcohol and sugar (for sweet). The key is that the components of the wine (its structure) must act in the background without distracting the act of tasting. A perfect balance is when the components are almost imperceptible.  For young red and tannic wines, the story is slightly different as it will almost invariably be out of balance due to its elevated tannic structure compared to the softness of its alcohol and sugar (if residual sugars are present).  Here, we must consider another type of balance: the wine's ageing potential. For such wines, we must assess whether its fruit density (a.k.a. fruit concentration) will support its structure to enable the wine to resolve its tannins over time.  When the high quantity of tannins is softened and integrated, the wine will be in balance, and its structure will feel imperceptible as it should. However, for this process to work, there must be enough fruit density to support the voyage of time.  Think of it as the food a horse needs to move forward day after day.  Without food to nourish it, even the most muscular horse in the world will not go very far.  Then, there is the question of tannins’ quality.  But that is another matter for another post...

A most helpful formula of “wine balance” as proposed by Emile Peynaud in his book “Le Goût du Vin”…

The IAP, the Intense Aromatic Persistence, is the way the wine aromas clearly express themselves on the palate after spitting the wine. This graphic taken from the excellent book on wine tasting by EducVin.

Finally, the length of the wine is fundamental. If the bouquet of wine does not last, there is no interest.  Here, the critical factor is the length of the aromatics, not the length of the components, and it is often referred to as Intense Aromatic Persistence.

An objective framework...

I believe that with training and experience, it is possible to describe style and quality objectively.  However, without the discipline of an approach, it is challenging to be objective, no matter how much we taste.  Without clearly understanding how to define style and quality with a framework of thinking, it is easy to rely on emotional factors in our descriptions and assessments and thus, become subjective and unreliable.

With the above framework firmly in mind, we can begin to explore the particularities of each building block (grapes, ripening conditions, and winemaking) with consistency and guided curiosity and link the concepts together and deepen our understanding. When we are fluent in defining style and quality, we can more readily understand the factors that influence a kind in this way and rate at that level.

Style is the personality of the wine, whereas Quality is its measure of excellence.