What Balance!

[rchhchan]

Common tasting note for white wine (particularly New World Riesling):
“On the palate, it has mouth filling richness of freshly squeezed lemon juice, full of fresh grapefruit and citrus vitality, crisp finish and perfect balance of acidity and vinified in the bone-dry style”.
What are in balance here? The smell of lemon and grapefruit balanced with the taste of acidity? Olfactory detection balanced with palatal detection? Or the perceivable sweetness of alcohol and acidity of grapes? Had one lately. At 11% alcohol. and 0.2 % r.s. the wine tasted sour. It was like a Chablis made from Riesling. How fashionable.

[Jordan]

A bit like every man and his dog finding brett in his wine!!!

Damn its too late! 3:11 am and i am still up writing my thesis. I just found brett in my pepsi max can too.

[Red Bigot]

Well, in RED wine on the nose it's the fruit/oak balance (and lack of obvious faults) and on the palate it's usually a balance of fruit, tannins, oak, acid without any one sticking out unpleasantly.

For whites, esp riesling, where tannins aren't often a big factor, I guess it means the acid is just right to balance the fruit sweetness of the wine.

Almost by definition, you only need to be comparing two factors to talk about balance (the old balance scales) so fruit sweetness and acidity could be the go here. If there isn't enough acidity the wine may be cloying, if too much it will be too sharp on the finish cutting off the fruit sweetness too quickly.

[DaveB]

Maybe add alcohol to that as well

[Red Bigot]

Maybe add alcohol to that as well

For reds, for sure, just shows how little I'm bothered by relatively high alcohol. Maybe if they made 14+% riesling I'd like them more.

[cranky]

Maybe add alcohol to that as well

For reds, for sure, just shows how little I'm bothered by relatively high alcohol. Maybe if they made 14+% riesling I'd like them more.

Frankland Estate Riesling 2000 (Gt Southern, WA): 14% Alc/vol

I only have one, but I will have to let you know how it goes when I get around to drinking it...

...and no, it isn't labelled as a Late Harvest or sweeter style!

[rchhchan]

Red Bigot wrote: 1) If there isn't enough acidity the wine may be cloying, if too much it will be too sharp on the finish cutting off the fruit sweetness too quickly.
2) Maybe if they made 14+% riesling I'd like them more. [/quote]

1) May I conclude that a high acidity bone-dry Riesling is never balanced.
2) Read that there are Zinfndels with 17.5% in the U.S. for high alcohol
wine lovers. Perhaps adding Volka to white wine might work. Imagine
a bone-dry 40% alcohol Riesling which many may regard as good stuff.

[Wizz]

Hmmm...

Common tasting note for white wine (particularly New World Riesling):
“On the palate, it has mouth filling richness of freshly squeezed lemon juice, full of fresh grapefruit and citrus vitality, crisp finish and perfect balance of acidity and vinified in the bone-dry style”.

This tasting note refers to lemon juice, grapefruit and citrus on the palate. But:

What are in balance here? The smell of lemon and grapefruit balanced with the taste of acidity? Olfactory detection balanced with palatal detection?

There is no reference to smell in the note that you quoted. I think this is pretty clear. Acid in balance with fruit flavours. Any pieces of fruit picked from a tree is the same, they just have sugar in them as well!

At 11% alcohol. and 0.2 % r.s. the wine tasted sour. It was like a Chablis made from Riesling. How fashionable.

I've had 3 different Chablis from the Petit Chablis level right up to 1er in the last month or so. None of them tasted sour, altohugh the 1er wasbracingly acidic and searingly intense.

1) May I conclude that a high acidity bone-dry Riesling is never balanced.

I dont think this is universal, in fact far from it. Sure, there are some that are just too acidic, The 03 Seppelt Drumborg Riesling is one I can think of that was hard to approach on release. The 05 Grossett Polish Hill on the other hand was beautiful a month ago. Brilliant drinking now and will age beautifully. Even with its high acid content.

You posted this a little while ago:

Why do most people reject mildly sweet wine but readily accept or even crave for sweet beverages like fresh fruit juices with meals? It seems that: food with sugar is ok but food with sugar plus alcohol is unpleasant or even offensive. Puzzled!
Thanks

Do you prefer sweeter wines? Some of these can be very high acid but it becomes less apparent if there is sugar in the wine as well. I love alsatian whites in the high acid/residual sugar style (ironically, I fin the thing that unbalances some of them is high alcohol!). I've had trouble matching them with food though.

My 2c

Andrew

[Red Bigot]

Maybe add alcohol to that as well

For reds, for sure, just shows how little I'm bothered by relatively high alcohol. Maybe if they made 14+% riesling I'd like them more.

Frankland Estate Riesling 2000 (Gt Southern, WA): 14% Alc/vol

I only have one, but I will have to let you know how it goes when I get around to drinking it...

...and no, it isn't labelled as a Late Harvest or sweeter style!

I await your results with interest.

BTW, late harvest or sweeter style whites are usually lower in alcohol due to the fermentation being stopped before all the sugar is converted.

[Red Bigot]

Red Bigot wrote: 1) If there isn't enough acidity the wine may be cloying, if too much it will be too sharp on the finish cutting off the fruit sweetness too quickly.
2) Maybe if they made 14+% riesling I'd like them more.

1) May I conclude that a high acidity bone-dry Riesling is never balanced.
2) Read that there are Zinfndels with 17.5% in the U.S. for high alcohol
wine lovers. Perhaps adding Volka to white wine might work. Imagine
a bone-dry 40% alcohol Riesling which many may regard as good stuff.

Probably re-stating what Wizz said a bit (I agree with him).

1) This would not necessarily be a valid conclusion, high acid need not be the same as excessive acid, a rich fruit-sweet (but otherwise fairly dry in a residual sugar sense) white may need a fair amount of acid and the best sweet table wines have lovely fresh, clean acid on the finish to balance the sweetness and let it linger. So high acid may be Ok if it balances the other fruit characters, excessive acid is, by definition, where it is out of balance with the fruit sweetness. High acid does not necassarily mean sour though.

2) Warrabilla also gets up over 17% on occasion with Durif, but the wines are balanced. There are also a few white wines made in Australia by fortifying riesling or some other aromatic grape variety and releasing it at a young age.

[mphatic]

Red Bigot wrote: 1) If there isn't enough acidity the wine may be cloying, if too much it will be too sharp on the finish cutting off the fruit sweetness too quickly.

1) May I conclude that a high acidity bone-dry Riesling is never balanced.

1) This would not necessarily be a valid conclusion, high acid need not be the same as excessive acid, a rich fruit-sweet (but otherwise fairly dry in a residual sugar sense) white may need a fair amount of acid

I think Brian nailed the answer here. The confusion I believe, lies in the difference between fruit sweetness and residual sugar. So many people in the general public get this mixed up. It never ceases to amaze me when, at a tasting, someone will declare the (bugger all residual sugar) sauvignon Blanc as "way too sweet", screwing their face up as if I'd just poured a cup of sugar into their mouth, and then, taste the oaked chardonnay with much more r.s. and say "that's much better, it's so much dryer than the other one!".

One of the problems for wine promoters (and the people that come up with the wording on bottle labels) is the fact that when people approach the tasting bench, a very large percentage will ask the question "Are they sweet?" before tasting the wine. You know if you give them the answer they don't want to hear they will turn away. So which one do you talk about - ripe fruit or residual sugar? Start talking about both, and you're likely to confuse the average punter; then they'll leave anyway.

[Glen]

Common tasting note for white wine

I would prefer to see the tasting note attributed to a particular writer, and then several more examples of these tasting notes for this to be 'common'!

The only flawed part of the supplied note was

it has mouth filling richness of freshly squeezed lemon juice

as citric acid, or any acid for that matter, is far from mouth filling.

I think this thread is a bit of a white herring.

[Red Bigot]

Glen,

I was thinking the focus on the quoted TN on citrus and grapefruit didn't sound too attractive, but surely there is a lot more to lemon juice than just citric acid?

BTW I grow Meyer lemons in Canberra 'cos they are more frost tolerant, but they are also sweeter and less acidic than many other varieties, and what about that Pink Grapefruit? Maybe those of you that write riesling notes need to qualify the variety of citrus you detect.

[Sean]

deleted

[Red Bigot]

There are also a few white wines made in Australia by fortifying riesling or some other aromatic grape variety and releasing it at a young age.

Maybe like the Mountadam Ratafia Chardonnay I tried a couple of years ago - fortified I think. All I remember is that it tasted raisiny and sweet, a bit like a dessert wine.

Anyway out of curiosity I had a look on Google for info on it, and found some "experts" struggling with just this kind of "What is wine?" question as well.

See http://forum.auswine.com.au/viewtopic.p ... 5d19738ac6

Glaetzer also make a Ratafia (CD/mailing list only I think) and the Wendouree Muscat of Alexandria is this style I think and it used to be a riesling many years ago if my memory still works.

Re the 'experts' in the other thread, it was all too existential for me...

[David]

I remember doing a wine course conducted by Andrew Pirie in the early 70's. His approach to balance was quite analytical.

Up to then I had viewed balance as sort of a negative statement - a balanced wine was a wine where one characteristic did not overshadow another. Andrew's idea of balance was like a weighing scale with sweetness (sugar and alcohol) on one side and acid and tannin on the other. If sweetness was high' acid and/or tannin needed to be higher. If acid was high tannin needed to be lower and the reverse of course applied and also keeping in mind that acid and tannin reinforce each other in the mouth.

Since then for my own purposes I have factored in the body of the wine on the sweetness side.

As far as high acid rieslings (and Hunter semillons for that matter) with high acidity, I think we should also look at the balance of the wines in their maturity. A riesling at say 10 or 15 years that had very high acid when young can be glorious but if the acid level started lower it would be flat and flabby.

Having said that, I love Eden Valley and Clare riesling with piercing acidity as young wines. My mouth is alive.