The Tricky Task of Defining "Winey"

Once upon a time I knew what it meant for a wine to be "winey". Now I haven't the foggiest. Sorry.

Okay, "winey" is not the world's most helpful adjective, but to me it meant a sort of Platonic ideal of what a wine should be: if you were going to invent wine for the first time, this would be it. It would be the opposite of fruit juice; it would be sublime, the apotheosis of fruit juice; the point at which fruit juice becomes divine.

The tense, racy Schlumberger Riesling, Les Princes Abbés 2014 that we drank the other Sunday; that was winey. Couldn't have been winier. Old Champagne is winey. Old red Pauillac can be winey; old red Burgundy can out-wine most things. Sangiovese can be winey. Riesling, particularly mature Riesling, can be fabulously winey. Tempranillo hardly ever is. Orange wine should be super-winey, because it maintains only the faintest connection with actual fruit flavors. Yet it's not; maybe the texture is wrong.

So I saw it as a sort of secondary or tertiary combination of raciness and savoriness allied to a rich silkiness of texture: elegance, with acidity and tannins perfectly integrated, and all the fruit flavors subsumed into the subtlety of maturity. Tension is winey. The saffron note that Semillon gets with age is winey, but oaky flavors are not winey. High alcohol is not winey. Young, primary fruit flavors are not winey.

Then I asked Michel Rolland what he thought.

"It's about size and weight," he said. "It's heaviness, in a good sense. It's the opposite of elegance and finesse. Not the complete opposite, because you can have it with finesse; it's more about being full-bodied than lacking in finesse."

Oh.

This did give me an inkling, though, that "winey", or "vinous", or "vinosité" might mean what you want it to mean; whatever you most admire in wine can be sanctified with the adjective "winey".

Emile Peynaud in The Taste of Wine (1983; English translation Macdonald & Co, 1987) is another believer in alcohol, but in a very different context. He says: "Upwards of 10º or 12º one begins to feel the sensation of warmth called vinosity." He also talks about "Vinosity, the warm impression made by alcohol on the palate". At 1 percent-plus, that is, not the 14.5 percent of today.

Peynaud also says: "To say that a wine is vinous is not tautological. Vinous does not mean simply 'having the characteristics of wine', in the sense of fruit with a winy taste or roses with a winy odour. The vinosity of a wine is a taste property relating to the amount of alcohol it contains, to its alcoholic strength… Everything is relative, to be sure, but it seems that below 11º a wine cannot be described as vinous."

It's not the same as body, he says; it's not the same as suppleness. But high alcohol is commonplace now; in 1983 it was reasonable to hang a definition of vinosity on alcohol because, in 1970s France, getting much over 12 percent had usually been a challenge. It was reasonable to regard more alcohol as better. If we use the same definition now, every wine except some Mosel Riesling could be considered vinous.

If alcohol is still the main criterion, then it is possible for a wine to be over-winey; wininess, if it is based on alcohol, ceases always to be a virtue. Instead, with acidity on its way to being as elusive as alcohol was then, perhaps we should focus on a balance of alcohol and acidity.

Michael Hill Smith MW (who says he'd never use the word "winey" though he might use "whiney"…) sent me a quote from Alexis Lichine, in which he defines vinosity as "the essential quality or heart of a wine". My colleague Andrew Jefford has defined it in Decanter as "a quality of seamless alcoholic warmth and palpable fermentation complexity in a wine of harmonious balanced character".

This is getting closer to something appropriate to today, but it is still too inclusive. Alex Hunt MW, purchasing director at Berkman Wine Cellars in London, sees it as an impression of substance. "Glycerol, perhaps? Wine doesn't have to be high in alcohol or concentrated to be vinous. For me it's the opposite of 'watery' (but not the opposite of 'dilute')."

If we move away from alcohol then let's turn to a famously elegant and never over-alcoholic Bordeaux. What does Jean-Claude Berrouet, ex-winemaker of Petrus, think?

"'Vinous' is an alliance of characters: it is lightly unctuous, tactile, and with an alcoholic character, which meld. It is all of those. Wine which is vinous is wine in which the tannin has disappeared; it is unctuous. It must not be too alcoholic, or it dries out. It gives sensual pleasure. Can a young wine be vinous? That's an interesting question. Aging is about tannins and the characteristics of tannins. A lot of people think that tannin equals ageability, but that is false. The 1975s from Bordeaux have dried out. Why? Because they had too much tannin, and hard, green tannin. Today we have higher alcohol, and alcohol is a great extractor of tannins. But we have less freshness than before, and freshness is important [to vinosity]."

Freshness – yes. I remember tasting in the Napa Valley years ago, when massiveness was at its peak, and listening to winemaker after winemaker assuring me that they loved freshness, they loved minerality, and that I would find these valued characteristics in their wines – which to me tasted of alcoholic raisin jam and that were utterly undrinkable. Yet the adjectives they used to describe their wines were the same as I would have used to describe Berrouet's Petrus. (How they would have described Pétrus I do not know – though the term "green" was usually applied to anything not apparently picked at raisin stage.)

So we use the same words, but mean different things – or just see wines differently. The problem lies partly in cellar palate, to which we're all prone – we tend not to see the faults of the wines we're used to – and partly in the difficulty of pinning down something as subjective as flavor, with words. For language to be useful, words have to have an objective meaning on which we can all agree. Some descriptors are relatively easy: a peach tastes the same all over the world, and so does a raspberry. But vaguer terms like "winey" are a lot trickier. If "winey" means the ideal of what wine can be, then your definition of it will depend on your personal tastes.

Over to Burgundy, home of the most detailed terroir expression on earth, and to consultant Bernard Hervet of Faiveley, who sees vinosity, surprise surprise, in detailed terroir terms. "For Chambolle, for example, I will never use the term 'vinosité'… For Volnay, no, except in Santenots. Chambolle never. Corton quite often."

He understands it to be "the expression of something with depth, but not strong. Complete; but it's not a question of extraction. It has to be natural. Each appellation, each terroir, is different. Some years never express vinosité, but others can express it in many different places.

"Wine must be ripe to have vinosité, but I don't make a parallel between ripeness and vinosité. They are different. It's not a matter of bottle age; that's not necessary. With age, some reds could express more depth and vinosité, but normally when I am tasting, vinosité is immediately apparent in the wine. It comes from the terroir and the village; it can be an expression of terroir, but it is not entirely that. Some years can bring vinosité to terroirs that don't have it normally."

Is wininess in fact just a mirror that reflects back the best version of ourselves? In which case, I must be careful how I use it.