To Blend or Not To Blend
In the fall of 2019, I made 60 gallons of wine. The 30 gallons of Cabernet Sauvignon was a little high in acid and the 30 gallons of Syrah was a little low in acid. The Syrah grapes were also high in sugar with the brix up around 28 and the Cab just the opposite. In the fall of 2020, I blended the 2 together and put the blend in a new oak barrel.
I would now like to bottle this wine but to me, it tastes a little bitter with only a few flavor characteristics. It is not a balanced wine. The pH is good at 3.5 which gives the right amount of acid to the wine. I am on the fence on what to do with this wine, and this led me directly to the tongue and taste map to begin my research on how to help my wine.
A well-rounded or balanced wine is a wine which has just the right combination of taste sensations and flavor characteristics to balance in the mouth. These sensations and characteristics are sweet, salty, sour or acidic, bitter, fat, and umami. Three umami identifiers (chemically known as amino acids or esters in wine terms) are fruit, vegetation (flowers, herbs, plants) and minerality. If you wanted to break that down further, in some red wines you can taste blackberries, cherries, nuts, gravel, sandstone, violets, roses, lavender, etc.
These flavor characteristics work together to form that beautiful balance in wine. Wine makers sometimes blend their grapes at crush or blend the wines they have in barrels to find the overall taste experience that they like to have in a glass of wine. Not to add confusion but a beautifully balanced delicious wine can be described as “umami.”
There are flavor characteristics that go well together and some that don’t. If you have a wine that tastes primarily bitter, you may want to taste it with a creamy brie cheese or a fatty meal which can bring out the correct chemical reaction in your mouth to make the combination delicious. This same wine may not really go great with a spicy meal. The bitterness and spice together may exaggerate one another and make the wine taste even more bitter, or the food spicier, or both.
Wine is a living object; it changes over time. Ultimately, my preference would be to make a wine that does not need food to counteract some of the sharper edges such as high tannins, too acidic, or a flabby wine. When I tasted this particular wine a month ago, I was convinced I was going to need to blend out some of the bitterness. I had chosen a Malbec which had a lot of fruit on the front end with mild tannins.
I enlisted some friends, and we did a few tasting experiments with different amounts of Malbec in the wine and we all settled on about the same blend. Oddly enough, the day I had the pump out and was ready to blend, one last taste changed my entire plan. The wine over the past month had changed quite a bit and was beginning to balance itself out. Time will allow some amino acids to combine into more complex flavors and the barrel itself can add some flavors. The decision I made was to wait and taste it again in a month or two.
The next time I select a blend from the shelf at the wine store, my thoughts will be of what the wine maker went through to make that blend. How many times did they taste and wait before bottling? How many adjustments did they make to the wine to get that perfect balanced wine? If we are lucky, there will be notes from the wine maker on the back label. For this wine maker, I am still learning … one barrel at a time!
Photo credit: Kate Freese
