MINERALITY

Wine descriptions are like monsters under the bed: they’re there and they’re not. 

Whenever I detail a wine to people at a wine tasting and say, for example, that the wine “smells and tastes of cherries,” I right away need to pull out a sort of word mop. 

“No,” I will explain to a few who ask, “the winemaker didn’t add cherries to the wine. It’s just a word that describes this particular wine’s fruity aroma and taste, that’s all. ‘Cherries’ is the only word that will do.” 

And so it goes with a gazillion other wine descriptors such as “oaky” or “earthy” or “vegetal.” None of those elements is “in” the wine; they’re merely the words that we use to talk to each other about how that wine comes across, all a function of grape, place, craft, time, and many other possible things. 

Time was, not so long ago, that the term du jour in wine talk was “minerality.” It’s still regnant in some tasting circles. 

It describes the scent or taste (or even aftertaste) of some sort of mineral, stone or rock in a wine. Burgundian Chablis, for example, almost always tastes of chalk; red Priorat, of schist; Mosel riesling, of slate.  

It doesn’t matter that, unlike the red dirt eaters of Georgia, a very few of us ever have tasted or eaten chalk, schist, or slate. But each is an experience in its wine. It’s no more surprising to “taste” or “smell” chalk in Chablis than it is to sniff it wafting from a slag driveway after a light rain. 

Some years ago, in the course of a wine tasting, I put a swirl of 2004 Castello di Monsanto Chianti Classico Reserva “Il Poggio” to my nose and my head fairly snapped back, so alive was the wine with full-on aromas of gravel, iron and what I only could call “the cellar floor.”  

Were esters “from” those things “in” the wine? Had the wine somehow captured those scents in Tuscany and brought them with it to this country? That’s the contemporary version of the wine world’s $64,000 question. So far, the answer—and this, from many scientists—is “dunno.” 

One camp, the “gout de terroir” (“taste of the earth”) folk, believes that minerality in wine is a direct consequence of a chemical uptake of soil components by vines. Mineral ions in the soil make for mineral aromas and flavors in the wine. 

This seductive belief is birthed in the beautiful idea that wine reflects its origin; that wine voices its “somewhereness,” to use a term from the writer Matt Kramer. It is also armor against the so-called internationalization of wine’s flavor profile, the idea that the manipulation inherent in winemaking allows for a standardization of wine’s taste and, more importantly, its quality. 

Others point out that mineral ions, of themselves, are odorless and tasteless and that there is no possible translocation or transmission of their “minerality” into grapes, then into wine.  

To these scientists, the main impact of soil or subsoil comes from structure and drainage, a combination of nutrient saturation and moisture to assist both photosynthesis and fruit ripening.  

Because different soils (gneiss, volcanic, limestone, alluvial, clay, loam, etc.) do those two things idiosyncratically, any “minerality” is an expression of pure fruit vibrancy, mediated through a gentle-hands winemaker. But no traceable smells or tastes of rocks. Sorry. Nothing there. 

Despite these apparently conflicting views, most everyone who appreciates minerality in wine can’t but acknowledge that, well, Chablis tastes of chalk. They just account for it differently. 

“I don’t know how to explain [minerality] in some of my wines,” says Juan Munoz Oca, past winemaker at Columbia Crest, the Washington State monolith that turns out winner wines at every level of price. “But when I am walking in the vineyards, for instance, of our Horse Heaven Hills, in the early morning when the air is fresh, I can smell this iron-y, mushroomy smell that just is reflected later in the wine. It’s that simple.  

“I know that the minerals aren’t coming in through the roots,” he adds. “Maybe they are like a wax on the grape skins that transmits into the wine, I’m not sure. All I know is that the less I do to mess with the grapes, the more they express that place in the wine. It’s the aim of every winemaker.” 

What everyone along the minerals-in-wine scientific (or even amateur) spectrum agrees on is this: The best wines of the world tell you where they come from. Site typicity, “somewhereness,” “gout de terroir,” appellation, this or that mineral or rock or stone—it’s in the wine to the extent that winemakers don’t muffle or erase it when they take their grapes and transform them into wine.  

“We don’t taste a place in a wine,” wrote Harold McGee and Daniel Patterson in a well-known article titled “Talk Dirt to Me” published in the New York Times, “We taste a wine from a place.”