Savoring joy: The final steps in your wine journey

Can you believe we’ve been at this for three months now?

Before we dive into the last two S’s in your new hobby, I’d like to offer the best advice about wine and health that I’ve heard during all of this sudden turn against wine in the health community. Dr. Laura Catena is the head of the enviable Argentinian wine house Catena and its adjacent brands like Domaine Nico. She took over the family business from her father and has earned numerous prestigious accolades: from the Old Vine Hero in 2023, to being named WSET’s honorary president. I was receiving my own WSET Diploma in London’s Guildhall when she was named our new president. I have to admit I wished my graduation had been the next year so I could receive my diploma from her hands when she surprised us all with a Zoom in to our ceremony!

She’s also … an emergency room physician.

She recently said she didn’t know whether or not wine was good or bad for our health. But she did say that she knows that joy is good. And if a reasonable (you must have this conversation with your own medical care provider) amount of wine brings you joy, that joy is good for you … and removing that joy from your life would probably be bad for you. I’m all in on Laura Catena’s thinking about this. And it’s so fitting for our last article to wrap up your new hobby.

The last two Ss of the wine tasting process are to sip the wine and then to savor it.

In our last column, we talked about how our mouths were actually pretty bad at detecting flavor and what we experience as flavor is mostly given to us from our nose. But our mouths are very good at picking up the vital statistics of a wine — its structural elements. These are the wine’s sweetness, acid levels, tannin load, alcohol percentage, the weight of its body, and how it finishes.

Let’s first clear up what we mean by dry and sweet in a wine. A dry wine is one that has no sugar in it — or is perceived to have no sugar in it. The yeasts have done their jobs and converted all of the sugars in the grape juice to carbon dioxide, heat, and alcohol, or the winemaker has filtered the wine to remove any remaining sugar. A wine that is very fruity smelling may give the appearance of sweetness while still being “0.0,” meaning 0.0 grams of sugar in the bottle. One way to determine if a wine does or does not have sweetness is to hold your nose and block your smelling senses from joining the party and then stick the tip of your tongue into the wine — do you taste sweetness? If so, there is sugar in the wine. If not, it’s dry!

Acid comes to the wine from the grape juice itself or in the form of powdered tartaric acid that the winemaker can add at the end to balance the wine. To assess the wine’s acidity level, move some of the wine in your mouth to under your tongue and just over your carotid artery. You will feel pressure in the sides of your jaw. The intensity of that pressure is based on acid. The more intense the pressure, the higher the wine’s acidity level.

Tannins come to the wine through the grapes’ skins, stems, and if poorly managed, seeds. We experience tannin as roughness on our teeth. You won’t really encounter tannin in white wines unless you really know what you’re looking for, and even then, it will be very subtle and likely from oak. To experience red wine tannins, however, swish some wine between your teeth and your gums and then feel how sticky and rough your teeth now feel. That is tannin! Note how long it sticks around. Does it wrap all the way around to the back of your teeth like Bordeaux tannins? Or does it stay up in the front like Pinot Noir tannins? Or somewhere in the middle like Syrah tannins?

Alcohol is the product of fermentation (along with heat and carbon dioxide). We refer to it as low (11% or lower really), medium (up to about 14%), and high (14%+). Alcohol can feel hot — if you spit or swallow the wine and then breathe a puff of air out, note how cool or hot the breath is against the back of your throat. The hotter the breath, the higher the alcohol. You can also experience alcohol as weightiness in the wine.

And finally, all of these things (sugar, acid, tannin, and alcohol) contribute to the wine’s fullness of body. Sugar, tannin, and alcohol increase a wine’s body. Acid lowers it. Think of the wine’s body as the difference between lemon juice (light), orange juice, (medium), or mango juice (full). Milk works, too: skim (light) to 2% (medium) to 4% (full).

Why does it matter? Because these vital statistics impact your enjoyment of wine. I don’t care for huge tannin loads, so I often choose wines that do not have that like Pinot Noir and Grenache. I love high acid wines like Riesling and Chenin Blanc, so I choose them and look for them. If you love the feel of tannins on your teeth and don’t like to feel as if you’ve had a facelift, you and I will prefer different wines, and we will both be right.

Which leads us to the final and the most important S: savoring. Ask yourself: did you like this wine? Why or why not? Did it remind you of anything? Name it. Did it take you to a place you’d been before? Did you rekindle memories with a friend or loved one? It’s this moment in wine when we should be finding Dr. Catena’s joy if we liked the wine — maybe we remembered a friend or a special place or a great bottle we had in a special place with a dear one. Now, friends, that is joy in wine. And we all need a lot more savoring joy these days.