Next time you’re in a restaurant where the wine list is taken seriously, eavesdrop on what the sommelier has to say as she moves from table to table. The word you’ll hear over and over is “minerality’’ — or one of its numerous more specific equivalents: granite, limestone, tufa, slate, shale, schist. It’s as if American taste and sophistication had grown up overnight. It’s not just about fruit anymore.
This is wonderful news for diners, because fruit-driven wines, though often gratifying sipped on their own, have in our view never been all that easy to pair with food. It’s a grand turn of events for the wine enthusiast who struggles to find things consonant with adult taste when spreading a white linen napkin across the lap. One day every resto worthy of its wine list may have a consulting geologist roaming the floor, rock samples in hand, tiny silver hammer tucked where a pocket square used to be.
It may be premature to announce the arrival of a new geological era, but there’s no question that a backlash against fruit-driven wines is afoot, with sommeliers infatuated with minerally sips cajoling diners to take them for a spin. Wines with advanced degrees in earth science now dominate shelf space in with-it retail shops, too.
As a term, minerality is used to describe a broad range of perceptions, from forest floor, loam, and humus to gravel, slate, flint, wet stones, chalk, even basalt, and coal (no joke), and may be thought of as solid and hard like granite or powdery like stone dust or gypsum. It’s true that few of us will have actually consumed any of these materials (we’re not recommending it), but the sensory associations, if fanciful, seem too compelling to casually dismiss.
For the more science-oriented among us, however, the picture is different. Minerals are generally described as falling into two categories: nutrient and geologic. The former exist as soluble elements like magnesium, zinc and iron, are present in our food and bodies and are important for health. The latter are compounds that form the physical framework of rocks and soils and are generally insoluble.
To the degree that some tiny amount of nutrient minerals are made use of by vines and taken up in the form of ions, their presence in finished wine is extremely attenuated. They’re challenging to detect even in the laboratory, with concentrations well below the sensory threshold. But these points are moot, since mineral nutrients are flavorless in any case.
Wine is not like mineral water which absorbs and holds in solution an array of inorganic compounds soaked up in long subterranean sojourns. It’s these particulates that give mineral water its characteristic briny, bitter, alkaline character.
This process doesn’t describe the interaction of geologic minerals with vines or their fruit. Flint present in soil cannot translate into “flinty’ flavors in wine. The most likely research-based explanation being bruited suggests that these stony, fumey effects owe their existence to sulfur compounds produced spontaneously and naturally in the fermenting vat.
Your correspondent is partial to the view that minerality as a term current among wine enthusiasts is really just a way to describe a spectrum of flavors generated by fermentation that don’t read as fruity or leafy or floral or herbal or spicy and to which we struggle to give a name. As always, when facts are in short supply, the imagination steps in.
While leaving certainly to a future generation, we contemporaries can at least rally around one indisputable if not particularly science-based conclusion: Wine — whatever wholesome form it may take — rocks.