These are by no means big words, and they don’t convey complicated ideas. I use them a lot without thinking much about them. Yet when I tried to look up these terms in reference books, I could find very little.
The issue of structure came to mind after a recent wine panel tasting of 20 New Zealand pinot noirs from the 2008 and 2009 vintages. After we were done, I was left to wonder about the wines, which in general we found underwhelming.
Oh, they were all acceptable. Many of them were friendly and approachable, the kinds of wines you could serve at a neighborhood block party and nobody would complain. Yet few were exciting. I’ll just say it: many of the wines were boring.
For the tasting, Florence Fabricant and I were joined by the husband-and-wife team of Scott Mayger, the general manager of Telepan on the Upper West Side, and Beth von Benz, a sommelier and wine consultant.
What was the problem? In our discussion, the usual suspects came up. Many of the wines were lacking a sense of place, Beth said, which may have been true but did not, I thought, explain our lack of excitement.
A sense of place — the idea that the wine you are drinking expresses the specific qualities of a particular place and a particular culture or people — develops over time, as farmers and consumers come to understand the qualities of a piece of land.
Production of pinot noir in New Zealand is still a recent phenomenon, a couple of decades old; centuries have gone into understanding Old World vineyards.
In past tastings of New Zealand pinot noir, we have similarly concluded that the wines lacked a sense of identity, and I have likewise attributed that to the youth of the industry. But this seemed a step backward. It was not merely that the wines were not expressing terroir. Many were not engaging in that come-hither dance in which a glass of wine implicitly says, “Drink me, drink me.”
We discussed other problems: wines that were overly concentrated, wines that were not concentrated enough; wines that seemed too sweet, and wines that oddly enough seemed both too sweet and too bitter, and a host of other issues.
But the thing that kept coming back to me was a lack of definition in the wines, a sort of muddiness that prevented many of them from expressing themselves with clarity and precision.
So what do I mean by that? Structure is like the skeleton of the wine. If you removed the bones from a human body, you would have a quivering, gelatinous mass of organs, muscles and the rest. These components are useless without the skeleton, which allows the body to stand tall and to move with purpose and authority.
The same is true of structure in wine, even if the skeleton is figurative rather than literal. A properly structured wine advances through your sensory apparatus in an assertive, decisive manner. It is focused rather than blurry. Without a proper structure, a wine can simply arrive with a thud.
In red wines, structure comes primarily from two elements, tannins and acidity. Tannins are mostly found in the grape skins, though they can also be imparted by the wood in oak barrels. Acidity is generally found in the grape juice. As grapes ripen on the vine, tannins become less harsh and acidity diminishes as sweetness rises. The relationship of tannins, acidity and sweetness is integral to a grower’s decision about when to harvest the grapes.
Structure itself is not a simple thing. It can be coarse: heavy, mouth-gripping tannins or teeth-jarring acidity. Or it can be fine, in which case the structure itself is almost imperceptible, except for the shape it gives the wine, which will seem precise and clear. I love this quality in a wine, especially in pinot noirs, which should never be coarse.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/dining/reviews/pinot-noir-from-new-zealand-wine-review.html
