Something I’d like to talk about today as a virgin member of the legendary, esteemed, iconic and studly group o’dudes (and my little sis’ now and again) known in the blogosphere as The Cork Soakers (tip of the hat lads, or rather in my case, a garbage can lid) is balance in wine.We hear about balance a lot, but it’s worth covering again and again ad nauseam until we get it through our thick skulls that it’s really important in wine. Hey, I’m a Libra, I care about balance; it’s in my astrological genes. I’m also an amateur wine grower/maker, so I’m discovering these things first hand as I plod my way through the knowledge of the craft. Side note: I can’t help but tell this joke; it’s funny, and it proves that I have the sense of humor of a 12 year old. “How do you know that diarrhea is hereditary? How, you ask?...It runs in your jeans.”
OK, back to the seriousness of balance (see, I’ve just proved some of the points I’m about to make about balance. Seriousness weighed against frivolity makes for a kind of balance. So does some stupidity mixed in with a dabble of brilliance…in my case make that a smidgen).
We all can recognize when we’ve had a wine that’s out of balance. Maybe it’s too much of the oak buzz saw ripping your face off in a Cali Cab or Chard until you reek of sawdust and you feel like they should compress you into a tiny pellet and toss you in a pellet stove so you can be carbon neutral and feel good about yourself again, or maybe it’s the acid bath in an unripe white or red wine th
at’s pinching your face to a pin prick of a shriveled visage like in the Apple Photobooth app.. Whatever the case, we know it, or rather feel it when we get an unbalance in wine. It causes a disturbance in the Force. It’s not good, and despite all the olfactory evidence we need to pass on such wines, sometime they score big with the wine press, real big. Parker and Spectator plant big wet kisses and dry hump the legs of some of these out of whack wines. At the recent Theise tasting in NY (which I had the honor of attending; both drinking and pouring ((I hope I done you proud Heidi Schrock!))), I tasted a certain 10 year old Spanish cult wine that scored a whopping 99 by Parker and tasted only of new French and American oak! I didn’t spit the wine mind you, it was probably $30 for a 2 oz. pour, but hell, all I could think of was, wow, this is a decade old, and all I notice right off the bat was oak! It was very silky and had some nice fruit, but that didn’t right the scales. They hung way slanted from the wood (I just said hung and wood in the same sentence).So we can recognize a wine as out of balance when one flavor or component really sticks out and dominates, that’s the easy part. That wine becomes one dimensional (maybe we even like that dimension, but if it’s not tempered with another component, it sings off key). But here’s the opposite side: Say you are a young budding winemaker and you want to make balanced wine. With your carefully schooled vintner skills you craft a safe and squeaky clean wine with all the proper analysis checked and re-checked; your steel stainless and temp controlled and purged of all offending O2; your oak new with world class provenance, and all the wine risks banished to the nether regions of your floor drain. “What’s possibly wrong with that?” you say. Balance in winemaking is more than shooting down the anally straight and narrow path between the double solid yellow lines of a 2 lane road. You can certainly make a good wine doing that(maybe a great one), but it’s probably going to be a bit boring. These are the ho-hum wines, drunk one minute, forgotten the next second. Every wine starts to taste a little bit like every other wine of the same varietal, or even across varietals! A Chard sans oak tastes like a Sauv. Blanc, and your Gruvie tastes like a Riesling, and the reds all taste like fruit salad. Give me a double dose of over the counter acetaminophen and let me die in my sleep! Come on people, I thought we were passionate about this stuff!!! Balance is a much wider path than squeaky clean wine making, particularly balanced and beautiful wines, but certainly not as wide as the point whore wines of the world would have you believe. If you like oak, use oak, but please don’t drop $1200 bones on a new French oak barrel and then bury me under a pile of friggin’ sawdust! Use it judiciously, and let the fruit, the acidity and the minerals have their saw as well. They have a voice too, you know, and they speak of balance. Wine makers can bob a bit back and forth across the middle of the road of balance using all the tools in the tool box, but they can’t go too crazy and get all schizophrenic on my ass! I have a garbage can lid, and I will hit you!
All the wines of the world can be beautiful, but they should be made carefully and allowed to speak of place and time (terroir if you will, all wines have it, it’s how it’s shown). Even some of the wine “faults” like volatile acidity and brett have their place in wine (at threshold levels they can lift aromas), but don’t feed me vinegar or drag me through the bottom of the pigsty, ‘cause my little bro fell into that shit as a kid, and I’m not going to let that happen again! We’re looking for balance, but we’re also looking for memorable. After all, isn’t that what sticks with us the most, those beautiful, balanced, nuanced wines that makes us stop and think, wow, I like drinking wine, and this is a special moment. Now I’m going to drink a little bit more, and where was that partner of mine?
-Oscar the Grouch-
