The Wine Backlog
I began my wine journey in 2019. I never wrote things down I just drank wine on my neighbor’s porch and watched the birds fly out over the stream that cut through the valley just beyond the fence line. In February of 2021 I bought my first tasting journal and began to log what I was drinking. The next few posts on this blog will be a review of those wines that I drank at the beginning of my career. To me it seems that transparency on how I got to where I am is more important than pretending that I hold a vast wealth of knowledge, that, in reality, isn’t much different that the knowledge held by most people.
Wine 1: Oak Ridge Vineyards 2018 Ancient Vine Zinfandel—
The wine comes from Lodi, CA in the United States. It is a new world wine.
It is deep purple. With aromas of red fruit, hints of pepper, american oak, and had a smokey quality to it. Medium plus body, medium tannin, medium acidity, high alcohol (sitting between 13.5 and 15). The wine is dry. I gave this wine a face that looks like this ( : l ) and a rating of 3/5.
By now you’re probably asking just what I mean by all of that nonsense up there. So I have broken down that information a little bit further.
New world wines are wines produced in places that aren’t Europe. So if it was colonized, it is a new world spot.
Color being deep purple is an idication of skin contact and the age of the wine. Color comes from the skins of grapes. White wine has no skin contact, rose has no skin contact. An orange wine is a white made with skin contact. So, of course, a red wine is a wine made with red grapes that has skin contact. It is also a major source of tannin. Tannins are what makes your tongue feel like leather— you know when you drink black tea that has been steeping too long and it is just bitter and makes the sides of your tongue feel strange— good. That is tannin. It comes from the skins of grapes along with the color.
Aroma, okay so I will be the first to admit that when somms talk about aromas in the wine they sound like a combination of pretentious latin professor, hipster, and magician (like the fantasy kind not the dudes with colored cloth and a rabbit on stage). But each wine does have smells, they all come from minerals transfered from the soil to the grapes, the yeast used in fermentation, the fermentation vessel, oxidation level of the wine, age, etc. The most important thing to note is that smell, in the human brain, is linked with memory. So if you haven’t smelled a brand new hose, have never experienced petrichor, or have never held a fresh red currant, you’re going to find aromas a little harder to specify. In the case of this Oak Ridge I detected “Red Fruit” super broad category that includes all sorts of things: cherries, cranberries, red currant, strawberries, and raspberries. Those are just a few examples of red fruit, so I was able to narrow down the smell but not all the way. Next we move to American Oak. I know you are thinking that I skipped over the pepper but I didn’t don’t worry. American Oak contributes things like pepper and vanilla to the smells in wine. So with the case of this wine, I got clear black pepper followed by vanilla. That tells me it was aged in American Oak to some degree. Lastly we move on to that smokey quality, this actually has to do with the wildfires in California more than anything else. Essentially chemical compounds from fire can leech into the vines and add smoke flavors to the fruit.
I say that this wine has medium body, which is all about mouth feel. A light body is like water in the mouth it doesn’t have a particularly viscous feeling. Full bodied is like swishing whole milk around the mouth. So a medium body is kind of like drinking 2% milk, it has a little bit more texture to it, but otherwise is still light and doesn’t rest too heavy on the palate.
We already covered where the tannin comes from. So this wine has medium tannin like a cup of Lipton tea, for my English readers, think about having an understeeped Typhoo or Tetley.
Alcohol is largely an indicator of one thing, how much sugar was converted in fermentation. Sweet wines tend to have lower alcohol. Dry wines tend to have higher alcohol. This is of course not always the case, but it is a good rule of thumb. Next thing about alcohol is that you can train yourself to sort of ball park the amount of burn that alcohol adds to something. Do a shot of whisk(e)y or a spirit of your choice at 40% abv. feel that burn? That is alcohol (mostly). Now take a glass of table wine at 10%, oh you’re an american? Get one at 12.5% take a little sip, and, keeping the alcohol in your mouth breathe in (from your mouth) and feel the alcohol vapors hit the back of your throat. Cool, now you know what that is like try it with a heavy wine like this one at about 14%, you can actually feel a difference. Of course this is not the be all end all way of detecting alcohol in wine, we also look at the legs of a wine. Swirl it in your glass and see the streaks heading back towards the liquid, that can help you see the sugar content and ballpark your alcohol as well.
Lastly we are going to look at acidity. Now if you are out tasting wines with friends this is the easiest way to look like an idiot, but one who knows what they are doing. The acidity in wine is what makes your mouth water, i.e. you start to salivate. So take a sip of wine, swish it aroung a bit, and then swallow. Look at the ground and open your mouth, keep your head down. Are you drooling like you just finished a math lecture in highschool? Great that is a high acid wine.
A great wine is going to be balanced and keep everying thing in line with that. This wine had too much alcohol and had too much of that american oak come through in the flavor. It was not fully balanced and so it didn’t stand out as a great wine. But if you want to have friends over for dinner and you aren’t sure what to bring, this is absolutely a safe choice. It can be purchased for arount $15 dollars at Total Wine. It won’t break the bank but it won’t change the world either. I stand by my judgement of a 3 out of 5.