The Basics |
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How Did They Get the Wine to Smell and Taste like...? |
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The most amazing characteristic of wine to the writers of this website is the unbelievable amount
of aromas, flavors and tastes that a simple little fruit like a grape can produce once it's
tranformed into wine. Depending on the amount of wine you've had the pleasure to drink, you
could've tasted or sensed any number of fruits from apricot to cherry to strawberry. That might not seem too strange since a grape is a fruit, but then you have wines that taste or smell like chocolate, coffee, butterscotch and nuts. Then, you can get even crazier smells and flavors such as earth, mushrooms, grass, wet stones and in extreme cases, manure (and that's considered a good thing by many). Some Sauvignon Blancs So, how does this happen in wine? Many people mistakingly believe that somehow the ingredients that the wine ends up smelling and tasting like are mixed in like the winemaker was creating a martini or mixing together a recipe for cake batter. In reality, a wine's characteristics come from a combination of the grapes and the winemaking process. The grapes themselves naturally contain the fruit and vegetable characteristics that you smell (as part of the aroma) or taste, and then the winemaking process (barrelling, aging, blending grapes together) takes care of the rest. For example, scents and flavors such as butter, smoke, vanilla, cinnamon or caramel are not naturally found in grapes or wine after it has fermented. To create these flavors, winemakers store the wine in toasted oak barrels, which then imparts alters the wine's characteristics and adds those additional attributes. Always remember, it's the combination of the grapes and the winemaking process that gives wine those myriad of smells and flavors. |
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