- Season 4 Trailer
- Wine 4 Green Pizza
- Inside the Fort Knox of Wine
- Wine 4 Spag Bol
- English Wine and Climate Change
- Wine 4 Fish Pie
- Our WINE(S) OF THE YEAR 2022!
- Wine 4 the ULTIMATE burger
- Selling Net Zero Wine
- The Wine Lover’s Wish List
- How To Be a Better Wine Lover
- Burgundy – The Tipping Point?
- The New Beaujolais
- Wine and Your Microbiome
- Australian Pinot Noir Comes of Age
- The End of the Hangover?
- New Zealand Chardonnay
- News & Views 1
- Santorini – Wine’s Jurassic Park
- Santorini – Wines to Save an Island
- How Wine Gets Rocks Wrong
- Portugal’s Fine Wines
- The Mystery of Minerality
- Germany’s Pulling Power
- The Microbial Face of Terroir
- LIVE Q&A (Winchester)
Summary
It’s a wine word almost everyone uses – but no one really knows what it means, what causes it, or where it’s come from.
It makes some people angry, it leaves others mystified – but some adore the term and can’t get enough of it.
Is this yet another example in wine of (as one listener calls it), ‘superstition, witchcraft and myth’ that is nothing more than, ‘absolute b*llocks’?!
Welcome to the big ‘minerality’ mystery.
In this episode, we dare to dive headlong into the snakepit of confusion, ambiguity and downright mystery that is the notion of minerality in wine.
But we’re not alone. We’ve recruited the likes of sensory scientist Dr Heber Rodrigues and writer Meg Maker to enlighten us with the latest research and thinking on this intriguing topic.
We ask questions like: what makes a wine mineral? What do people mean by the term? Which wines in particular tend to show mineral characteristics? Is it a good or a bad thing? Is it a vineyard or winemaking phenomenon?
Ultimately – should we get rid of it, or cherish it?
We taste two wines in order to put our own language under the microscope. There’s an element of mud-slinging and mutual recrimination before we manage (more or less) to define what we mean by minerality.
We also give a final judgement on whether, in our view, minerality should be part of the wine lexicon or not. The result…may surprise you.
Starring
Wines
Here are the wines we taste in this episode. Click on the wine name for the Wine Searcher link to find where you can buy this wine around the world:
- UVC Chablis Premier Cru 2010, Esprit de Chablis, 12.5%
- Anhydrous Afoura Santorini Assyrtiko 2021, 14%
Links etc
- This episode is dedicated to Dr Wendy Parr, a leading light in the world of sensory perception and wine.
- The term ‘olfactory’ is used a fair bit in this episode. It means, ‘of or relating to the sense of smell’
- Here’s a link to Heber’s paper on ‘Relationship between production type in the Chablis vineyard and the search for a mineral wine style‘ (2022)
- This is Heber’s paper on differences regarding wine minerality between experts and consumers (2015)
- Minerality in Wine: Towards the Reality behind the Myths is a fascinating 2018 paper by Wendy Parr, Alex Maltman, Sally Easton and Jordi Ballester
- You can find our podcast on all major audio players: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Amazon and beyond. The button below will redirect you automatically to this episode on an audio platform on your device.
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