Wine Fundamentals Part 4: FEW

(Parade) - Grandma’s musty closet. The mist that rises off sea foam after a wave crashes onto the beach. Unripe pineapple rind that has been dunked into sweetened iced tea. The wet soil on top of a freshly picked button mushroom.

What are we talking about? Well, wine, of course! These descriptions are just a few we’ve heard used to describe wine (go ahead and giggle—we can assure you that we do!), and while we’re envious that some people have such gifted noses/palates, not everyone does. Describing wine is difficult for many of us, so you can imagine how intimidated we were when we were first learning how to do it—while one of our peers was finding over-baked, Golden Delicious apples with cinnamon and crispy, buttery crumbles on top, we were struggling just to find “apple.”

But we quickly learned that describing wine really isn’t so scary. It just takes fundamental knowledge, an understanding of what to look for, and lots of practice. If you’ve been following our wine fundamentals series, you know that viticulture techniques affect the flavor profile of a wine, that aging wine in oak barrels imparts flavors that aging in stainless steel tanks doesn’t, and that Old World wines will likely have more minerality than New World wines. So you already know some of the characteristics to look for! To that fundamental knowledge, let’s add a simple formula we use when describing wine. It’s called FEW: Fruit, Earth, and Wood.