The Taste of a Place

Once again I have found something in my daily life much more interesting than the age-old debate between red and white (so, if you really want to know the difference, you may just have to find me and contrive to make a scene about choosing one over the other; if I have some good anecdotal material, maybe I’ll finally get around to writing that post…).

But in the meantime:

Terroir. A word loaned from the French loosely meaning “sense of place,” terroir is what gives wines from different countries and regions their character. You can (ostensibly) plant the same grapes in South America, New Zealand, France and the United States, but despite their related DNA, none of the wines will taste the same.

Wait? What?! Grapes are grapes and they make wine, right? Wrong.

Grapes may be grapes, but not all parcels of land (and, therefore, not all bottles of wine) are created equal.  

How is this even remotely more interesting than the ongoing turf war between Reds and Whites? Well, perhaps it’s not. But I was sitting in class the other day discussing, of all things, an essay on cheese when the professor mentioned terroir with a pointed look in my direction (as my internship coordinator, he is well-aware that I am currently working at Basignani).

Much to my chagrin, last Thursday and that pointed look revealed yet another term I should know.

Besides being one of the more pronounceable French words associated with wine and winemaking, terroir connotes the special characteristics that soil, climate, geography, and even the choices the vintner makes during the growing season give a particular wine. I think I like how Washington Post staff writer, Jane Porter said it best: terroir is “a French term that literally translates as terrain but has come to mean the way foods and wine express the soil, climate, culture and tradition of a region.” (I am especially fond of that last bit, wines as expressing culture and tradition—when you open a good bottle of wine, can’t you just taste its history?)

Though the concept of terroir has been around since the ancient world, the French really deserve the credit for cementing our modern understanding of the term as how place influences taste (Napoleon III created the first protected region, Bordeaux’s Grand Crus area, in 1855). Perhaps the most famous terroir dispute is over the use of “Champagne” in sparkling wine labels. Vineyards from the Champagne region in France claim that their climate and location give the sparkling wine a certain finesse that cannot be achieved anywhere else. They would, as a result, appreciate it if other winemakers (particularly non-European winemakers, since the E.U. defines and protects specific growing areas) refrained from labeling their sparkling wines Champagne because, well, they aren’t Champagne.

What could any of this possibly have to do with Basignani? Well, quite a bit, actually.

For example, we grow Chardonnay here at the main vineyard and over on Belfast Road, but the resulting wines have radically different flavor profiles. Now, Bert hesitates to lay this entirely at the feet of terroir, as the vineyards are old and were planted before people paid much attention to clones (making it impossible to determine just how related these vines are). But he did give me an interesting metaphor that stated more clearly than any of the definitions I found online, precisely what terroir is:

“Vines are like people in that if you move them from where they were originally and they settle into a new spot, well, eventually they change.”

Vines, then—like people—settle; they take on the flavor of the area. Where a Yankee transplanted in the South might eventually develop a bit of a drawl to his or her normally clipped speech, a vine may just pick up a note of that honeysuckle flowering at the edge of the forest.

I wonder if perhaps Maryland wines, like Marylanders, display a particular blend of North and South?...but that is, alas, a topic for another blog. 

To Filter or Not to Filter?

I know, I know. If you read my last post, I promised to go over the difference between red and white in this, my next blog. But I hope you’ll forgive my digression to a more apropos discussion of filtered versus unfiltered wines. (Alright, it’s really only more pertinent than delineating what makes a red a red and a white a white--besides their color--because it came up over the weekend when my friends and I split a bottle of Basignani’s Marisa. But as they say: timing is everything….)

The motivation for my digression began a little like this:

“Oh good, it’s unfiltered!”

What is he talking about? I made a noncommittal noise as my friend finished reading the label and passed me the bottle to uncork. While I used my winged, you’d-have-to-be-an-idiot-to-mess-this-up corkscrew (sorry to my roommate if she reads this, but I still don’t understand how she managed to push a cork into the bottle a couple of weeks ago), I vowed to look up the difference between unfiltered and filtered wine at the earliest possible opportunity. After all, of the three of us, I’m the one working at a winery. This, I thought, is something I should know.

That was Friday. My determination to understand this filtered versus unfiltered business was cemented the next evening (Saturday, for those of you without easy access to a calendar) when one of my friends finished the bottle and discovered sediment in the bottom of her glass:

“Umm, Ryn. What’s that?” She tapped a curious and slightly cautious finger against her glass, directing my attention to the small pool of red at the bottom.

“Sediment. It’s unfiltered.” I could tell she was impressed with my ability to put two and two together and get four (a special thanks to my other friend who’d noticed the UNFILTERED printed on the label, therefore enabling me to sound knowledgeable), but her question made me realize that observing a correlation between the word “unfiltered” and the presence of sediment in the bottle was really just the beginning.

Again, I thought, This is something I should know.

My first instinct, as a member of Generation-Y (or whatever you want to call us), was to Google. So I did. Though there are a lot of hits for “Filtered versus Unfiltered Wine,” none of them seemed particularly reliable (with the notable exception of eHow.com).

So, I harkened back to elementary school and the days before Internet research. Yes, that’s right, I opened a book! I got out my copy of Phillip Wagner’s Grapes into Wine and used the index (the INDEX!) to look up filtration. Though his discussion is perhaps a bit too in-depth for a blog post, I thought I’d give you the highlights of wine clarification: what it is and whether or not it matters to the average consumer.

Sediment in wine is natural, even unavoidable—small particles from the grapes and dead yeast cells are inevitably left behind. Sediment, to me, has a bit of a negative connotation (after all, we talk disparagingly about sediment making rivers and streams murky) so I feel compelled to point out that there is nothing inherently good or bad about sediment in wine. It just is. The particles found in wine include tannins, coloring phenols and proteins—all of which are natural and none of which are harmful if consumed.

Still, some consumers (especially within the past 50 years) have come to equate clarity with quality. To clarify wine, some winemakers use finings (an agent that bonds with the suspended particles in the wine, pulling them to the bottom) while others use filtration.

Filtration, according to Wagner, “is in a sense the reverse of fining. When a wine is fined a sort of veil of the fining material is drawn down through the wine, dragging all suspended matter with it. When a wine is filtered the veil, a porous wall or membrane, is fixed and the wine is forced through it, leaving the suspended material behind and emerging clear and bright” (189).

There are several advantages to filtration over fining, including: time (filtration is much quicker than fining), consistency, the lack of chemical reactions, and the simple fact that filtration can be implemented at any point in the winemaking process (190). Despite these advantages, however, some winemakers are reluctant to filter, as the process may change the quality of the wine’s flavor and aroma, not to mention its aging potential.

Here at Basignani, we prefer to leave our dry wines unfiltered. If you’re worried about sediment (as drinking the sediment itself doesn’t taste very good) you can decant the wine, then pour carefully to keep the sediment out of the wine glasses. (In other words, don’t pour like a college student and upend the bottle…wine is not always good to the last drop!) 

Wagner, Philip M. Grapes into Wine: A Guide to Winemaking in America. New York, NY: Knopf, 1986. Print.

A True Family Affair

Family-owned and operated. It’s a marketing catch phrase we hear often enough, tossed around as it is with such seeming abandon by advertising agencies for everything from mom-and-pop shops to S.C. Johnson. (I bet at least 68% of you subconsciously filled in “a family company” after reading S.C. Johnson, didn’t you? Yes, it’s that pervasive. But I digress, and that’s a subject for another blog post.)

When we say that Basignani is a family vineyard, we truly mean it.

In fact, I’m one of very few interlopers on the premises. My first day in the small, pleasantly cluttered office above the tasting room, I met not only Bert and Lynne, but also their daughter Marisa and later her husband Griffin. My next day in the office, I met Elena and Ben, Lynne and Bert’s other daughter and son-in-law. Actually, the only adult members of the family I’ve yet to meet are Erik and Lawrence. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.

And it’s not what you’re thinking—Marisa and Griffin and Elena and Ben didn’t just stop by to check out the new foster kid. Each of them is intimately involved with some aspect of running the winery, whether in the fields or handling the business side of the operation. Meeting me was just a bonus (or, at least, I’d like to think so!).

There are a few other family members at Basignani that definitely deserve mention, even if they are of the four-legged variety. Most afternoons the Basignani Border Collies can be found outside the tasting room, or even up in the office, laying patiently (or sometimes not so patiently) at our feet in anticipation of a couple pats on the head.

You’ve probably noticed by now that I’ve left out a few very important members of the family: the wines. But as I’m still not well versed in tasting and describing wines, I think you’ll appreciate my restraint as much as Lynne and Bert in not attempting to tackle the list just yet. I will, however, share with you a few general wine facts that I’ve discovered over the past few weeks, beginning in the next post with the difference between red and white (it’s not as clear as you might think) and why wine might be considered an…acquired taste.