Alternative Wine Glossary Stelvin To Zorba
Stelvin Closures - The exceedingly pretentious name for a refinement of the screwcap; proof that you can’t stop progress, but you can screw it up. Stelvins are a step in a new direction. Cheap cork is anathema to wine and stelvin helps. It does not disguise poor quality wine and in a way the arguments that have steamed and raged in the past few years were typical of the opposing camps set up by traditionalists ands modernistas. For the cork industry were protecting their livelihoods and the new world producers were using research to bash the stick-in-the-mud old world, thereby promoting their wines.
Stepford Wines - A wine programmed in a laboratory to be stable, functional and devoid of personality.
Storage - creating the perfect cellar is one of life’s eternal quests, but the problem of storing wine at home is one that exercises one’s ingenuity. A bottle of wine is like a friendly vampire: keep it away from sunlight and in a stable cool environment (an open zinc-lined coffin would do) and he’s as happy as Larry. Frequent deviations of temperature and movement upset the wine. If your cellar is damp then bacteria breed and labels rot. Don’t put white wines in the fridge until you’re ready to drink them. And if you really love your wines read them some lyrical poetry.
Storage 2
I used to have a secret cellar
Where I kept the sweetest of my wine
Now it seems I’ve been too long
Hanging on the vine
And now she’s turning into water
Never be the same again
She’s turning it into water
All my wine tastes like rain
Damp has peeled away my labels
I can’t read the writing anymore
Nothing to grace my table
Nothing left to store
And now she’s turning into water
Never be the same again
She’s turning it into water
All my wine tastes like rain.
Al Stewart - Down in The Cellar
What do you mean it’s not about cellaring wine?
“Strain at a gnat and swallow a camel” - those who practise filtration are called gnatsies. Curiously, this expression derives from Matthew 23:24 and literally meant (in early versions of the New Testament) to strain out a gnat before drinking the wine. I see you’re looking confused as I am. I guess it means don’t be so fussy about little offences and gloss over the big ones.
Style - Wines may be divided by style in two distinct ways. Style can reflect the objective quality of the wine (light-, medium-, or full-bodied; oaked or unoaked; crisp, aromatic, spicy, floral, dry, medium or sweet and so on. Wines can also be categorised according to more subjective and intuitive criteria, such as: wild-and-exotic; thirst-quenchers; burnished by the sun; mellow fruitfulness; liquid aromatherapy; ABC (Anything But Chardonnay/Cabernet) or any formulation preceded by the question “Do you feel like?” which suggests that the wine has the capacity to evoke certain moods.
Subtlety - I’m an old-fashioned kind o’ guy. I like to be seduced by a wine, roll it around it my mouth learning as I taste. I don’t expect to play tonsil-hockey with oak on a first date. So many wines are extracted with a hammer and chisel; they have no grace notes, but are all souped-up sweetmeatedness. Unction has no function when flavour batters your buds into submission. For demure refinement give me a tongue-teasing Riesling.
Sussreserve - An unnumbered Swiss bank account where all grape must is stored
Sustainability - My heart sinks when I hear that countries like Australia and Chile are seeking to double their capacity, so that they can flood the market with cheap output. There is already over-production; we need less wine to appreciate its value, certainly less of the pasteurised, homogenised, filtered. I say convert the land back to kangaroo reserves or llama farms.
T.D. - Termites delight (a wine swimming in oak)
Tannins/Tannic - Tannin is a property found in the skins and pips of grapes and gives structure to wines. Tannins may be said either to be green or unripe, and consequently, astringent and mouth-puckering, or ripe and integrated, wherein they provide structure and balance to the wine’s fruit and acidity. A wine which is low in tannin and high in fruit is called “easy on the gums” in Oz-speak. See tutti-frutti.
Taste - “He who can distinguish a good fruit from a bad with his palate does not have to be able to express the distinction through a chemical formula and does not need the formula to recognise the distinction” (Arnold Schoenberg - The Theory of Harmony). Quite.
Tasting notes - Have two functions. Firstly, a series of trigger words to evoke the salient characteristics of wine. One may use the empirical register or develop a personal poetic vocabulary which makes the wine come alive. There is a fine line between the purely objective (boring, anodyne) and the whimsical. Having a tasting note suggests rightly or wrongly that you have tasted the wine and selected it especially for the list.
Temperature
Dear Glossy
My boyfriend gets hot under the collar whenever I propose chilling a red wine. What should I do?
Connie Undrum
Dear Connie,
Chilling a red wine is perfectly acceptable especially in warm weather when the alcohol will tend to be quite volatile. Indeed serving all wine at the appropriate temperature is very important. There are white wines, fine Burgundies, white Graves, Tokay Pinot Gris and Condrieu, for example, which perform more capably at a cool rather than frigid temperature. At the other extreme zingers such as Muscadet and Pinot Grigio like to be well chilled. But in reality each wine has its preferential temperature which you can only assess through trial and error. Certain reds respond better to being chilled than others - cru Beaujolais, Pinot Noir from the Loire and Alsace, Duras and Mansois from the South West, Chinon and Saumur, the main stipulation being that they must have sufficient concentration of juicy fruit.
Yours till the rending of the rocks,
G
P.S. Dump your boyfriend
Terroir I refer you to my monograph etc. etc. One of my favourite quotes from Trollope is the pithy aphorism: “Land is about the only thing that can’t fly away”. The sole intention of many wine-makers is to capture the essential nature of the countryside. Terroir is simply the wine describing the land and man working in harmony with the raw material to create that ineffable sense of region in the bottle. Although it has quasi-mystical connotations terroir is as real as the soil beneath our foot. The taste of terroir is however intuitively perceived and exists beyond the actual primary flavour of the wine as if to say in the words of Irving Berlin: “The song has ended but the melody lingers on”.
Terroirists - Growers who latch onto the notion of terroir as a gimmick to advertise their wines.
Thai food - a type of food mentioned in the matchless matching scenarios. The latest buzzword is thermal shock
Tradition - “Happy he who far removed from business tills with own oxen the fields that were his father’s.”
TCA, Trichloranisole - Not an invitation to experiment with a proprietary brand of aspirin, but the chemical compound which is formed in the cork by moulds in the presence of chlorine compounds. The Russian roulette of the wine world. See corked, Stelvin.
Tutti-frutti - I don’t want to be wine-gummed to death, as Victor Mature nearly said.
Trends - You can only predict things accurately after they have happened. Watch for the Club Med brigade: Portugal, Southern Italy and Greece and I’ll have an outside bet on English wines making a miniature dent in the market, although looking at the rain teeming down today, better make that English rice wine from the paddy fields of West Sussex.
Truffles/Mushrooms - One of the more appealing signatures of age in wine, particularly found in red Burgundy.
TV Pundits - Presenters with a highly developed sense of frivitas. Television has never knowingly under-trivialised food and wine. Of course, it has improved my mind - every time a food programme is on the TV I go out of the room and read a book (with apologies to Groucho Marx).
Underrated Wines - Support your local sherry. And remember that the bite of the Alsatians is even better than their bark. And do I need to mention Riesling again?
Underwined Oak - Also known as “chips in everything”.
The Unpronounceables -
Pacherencs - Pasha Ranks - a Jamaican reggae star
Morellino - Moray Leno - an oleaginous talk show host
Chacoli - Cheque Holy - a payment which clears your bank account with miraculous haste
Bairrada - Buy Harder - a coded advert in the name
Vegetal - at its worst a vegetal wine can be weedy and green with the flavour of one of those capsicums which has been in a pub display cabinet for aeons as a pseudo-garnish for the food they don’t sell. Some positive connotations: certain Burgundies develop intriguing secondary and tertiary aromas redolent of cabbage, or, if we are being fragrantly euphemistic, violets dying gently on a midden-heap.
Vilification - The process where good wine is unmade in the winery.
Vin Grisly - rose which has gone beyond the pale.
Vin de Table - Wine which will drink you under the table (Harry Eyres - The Bluffer’s Guide To Wine)
Vinotherapy - Believe it or not a range of beauty therapies that harnesses the anti-oxidant properties in grape-seed extracts. Different treatments include the Premier Grand Cru facial (surely a tautology?), the Crushed Cabernet Scrub and the Pulp Friction Massage. Maybe the Edgar Allan Poe story about they guy walled up inside a cask of Amontillado should be reinterpreted. It’s not a horror tale, but a playful advert for the ultimate nutty deep skin treatment.
Vintage - “The year listed on the bottle is not an expiration date - so that 1997 wine is safe to drink”. (Frasier)
V.A. - Volatile Alcohol. Volatile Acidity. Voluble Australian.
Why Web Wine.com? - It’s fast, it’s efficient, it’s “what am I saying?” It’s the triumph of hype over expectation. Although we may think that the wheel has been reinvented yet again, buying wine over the internet is just the same as mail order (Cue misty eyes). But wine is not a package holiday, a washing machine or a book - there is a risk factor involved. We try to give as much information on the site as possible to assist customers with their choice. Yes, you could purchase champagne and fine wine and anything branded, but generally it is best to seek advice from the experts. Remember that websites are essentially a form of on-line advertising, and you wouldn’t buy something just because it was advertised.
Writing - Wine Writing, defined by the Oxford Companion To Wine, as a parasitical activity enabled by vine growing and wine making but more usually associated with wine tasting, and even wine drinking, than any of the former.
X-cess - as in “Give me excess of it, that surfeiting, /The appetite may sicken, and so die”. Obvious, vulgar, over-acidified, over-oaked, heavily alcoholic, cloying wines tend to be indigestible and resistible. Three-piled hyperbole in wine tends to batter our critical faculties into submission; not only can’t you taste the fruit for the trees; but you get jaw-ache trying to ingest slowly the pneumatic properties of the Dolly Partons. Some people like this stuff, but they’ll pay for it in the end; there is, after all, no accounting for gout!
Xerophilous - a plant tolerant of droughty conditions and an unlikely high-scoring scrabble word.
Yeast - Wild thing/You make my heart sing/You make everything - including damn fine wine.
Zinfandel - Not the last grape in the alphabet (that special honour belongs to the Austrian Zweigelt grape), however, my fellow Americans, blessed by God, under one flag, one nation, indivisible, this is your one native grape variety. It comes in two incarnations: vile blush and the big rich bastard who lives on the hill. DNA fingerprinting suggests that Zinfandel is the same as the artery-hardening-to-pronounce Crljenak Kastelanski, a little known Croatian grape variety. Whatever. Capable of producing fine wines in the right hands (Paul Draper, Helen Turley and John Williams), when yields are low, otherwise can be hot and stewed. As Byron almost said, sometimes zin’s a pleasure. Described by one wine writer as the Harley Davidson of grape varieties, I would say more like Jim Davidson.
Zorba
“Pour out some wine, Zorba” I said. “Fill the glasses to the brim and we’ll drain them”.
We clinked glasses and tasted the wine, an exquisite Cretan wine, a rich red colour, like hare’s blood. When you drank it, you felt as if you were in communion with the blood of the earth itself and you became an ogre. Your veins overflowed with strength, your heart with goodness! If you were a lamb you turned into a lion. You forgot the pettiness of life, constraints all fell away. United to man, beast and God, you felt that you were one with the universe.
Zorba the Greek.
Nikos Kazantzakis.