01/11/07 Intensity of Flavors

Welcome to Vine to Wine! This is your host Linda Moran and today we are continuing our series exploring the basics of tasting and understanding wine. Today we will address the impact that texture has on our ability to describe a wine accurately. As we discussed yesterday, body is not describing the levels on intensity of flavor of the wine. When you are describing the levels of impact and flavor the wine has you would use terms such as rich and deep, to describe wine with layers of flavors that are imposing or interesting, and terms such as insipid or thin to describe wine that has little or no interesting smells and flavors. Delicate could be used for a wine with subtle nuances of smells and flavors where all is in balance it is simply less in your face and making a less gregarious impression although very pleasing. A wine need not be huge and bursting with all kinds of flavors to be good. It can be restrained and more sophisticated or just slow to open up. It may need to be free from the bottle and swirling and dancing in your glass for a time before it shows off just what it is all about. To me a wine like that is a seduction that entices me to want to learn more about  get to know it better so to speak. These types of terms describe the differing levels in the intensity of the wine as opposed to the texture of the wine, which is described as light medium or full body. Remember to send your wine questions and ideas for new topics to Linda at vine to wine dot net and thanks for joining me on today's Vine to Wine.