3 days ago
'Minerality' is a wine industry myth
Fifty-one years ago, I bought a bottle of Chianti. I was a nursing assistant, living in nurses' accommodation. Wages went on food, drink and books; I taught myself to cook. When the communal pans were laid aside, I opened the straw-swaddled bottle, poured the pale red wine and marvelled: every drop was sucked from Tuscan soils. It seemed incredible: we were sitting here, drinking Tuscany. Literally. Near Norwich. Gulp!
This astonishment expanded. Wine (I read) possessed a thing called terroir. That meant that its sensory character was predicated on the physical milieu in which its vines grew. Those who wrote about terroir usually used it as a synonym for soil and bedrock.
Wine culture has gone global in the past half-century. A critical industry now feasts on wine, like an algal bloom on a great lake. Wine websites encourage you to purchase hundreds of thousands of tasting notes – for wines you can't find, can't afford, haven't got room for and will never drink. Read them to lust and crave, and the word 'minerality' will cascade about you. According to the master of wine Justin Martindale, whose research paper examined the use of the term in more than 20,000 tasting notes written between 1976 and 2019, it was the most widely used descriptor for white wines (appearing in 19.2 per cent of the notes surveyed) and the sixth most used descriptor associated with reds. Is wine mineral soup?
The emeritus Earth sciences professor Alex Maltman of Aberystwyth University has been challenging this idea for a decade (most recently in Taste the Limestone, Smell the Slate, published by Academie du Vin Library). Vines, he points out, 'are made not from the soil but from oxygen, hydrogen and carbon derived from water and the air, everything being driven by sunlight'. These light-and-air plants can do nothing at all with rock minerals, which in any case have no aroma or flavour. Vines do metabolise nutrient minerals, mostly from humus – the organic component of soil – but they don't pass directly into grape juice.
Fermentation, moreover, is a transformative process: some elements are removed during it; others are added. Far from being 'mineral-laden', Maltman says, 'the actual nutrient mineral concentrations in wine are minuscule'. If you want to drink minerals, buy French Vichy Célestins or Spanish Vichy Catalan, whose dissolved bicarbonate, sodium, chloride, potassium and sulphide are the result of long residence times in subterranean aquifers.
So why the constant assertions of 'minerality'? Most tasting notes are a wild metaphorical fling. Wine doesn't contain blackcurrants, cherries and vanilla, though its complex chemistry may include substances that might suggest these ingredients. Anyone who farms, gardens or hikes will know that stones and earth have an aromatic personality, especially when worked or rained on – though Maltman points out that what our noses are reacting to is organic matter on those stones or in that earth, not minerals.
'Minerality' might be a metaphor for this embrace. It might also be a way of describing those flavours in wine that don't evoke fruit itself, or the processes wine undergoes (a creaminess from lees contact, for example, or vanillin from oak). Levels of salt (sodium chloride or halite) vary in wine and are likely to come from external sources (island winds, or repeatedly irrigated land). 'Minerality' is often linked to a wine's acid profile, especially when this seems (another metaphor) to have a crystalline edge.
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Most of the time, though, it's just cap-doffing and knee-bending: something writers say about wines they want to admire. I wasn't, in fact, drinking Tuscany; I was drinking something that had happened in Tuscany. Terroir isn't soil or rock, but place – and what happens there.
[See also: How to do it like a movie star]
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