A friend of mine once wrote a book about a very complicated subject – gardening. When I asked him why, he replied, “Because if I don’t write it now, I’ll know too much.”

I thought of that cryptic but astute comment upon receiving an inquiry from a reader asking, “Where do the flavors and aromas in wine originate, e.g., cherry, leather, tobacco, blackberry, etc. Is it from the earth, the vines themselves, or in the way it is processed?”

After decades of writing about wine, it’s been years since I’ve thought about such things. To call it “basic” is to suggest that this inquiry is somehow simple. It’s not. Rather, it might be better described as “fundamental.”

The answer is the classic multiple-choice exam category: “All of the above.” Flavors in wine derive from several sources. The fruit flavors come from the grapes themselves, as can scents of leather or gaminess. Some strains or clones of syrah, for example, deliver strong scents of leather and gaminess, while other clones do not.

Also, climate plays a role in magnifying or diminishing these flavors. Staying with syrah for the moment, a cool-climate syrah has strong blueberry scents. Warm climate syrah, in comparison, lacks the blueberry note but has more leather and gamey flavors.

The scent of vanilla, for its (ubiquitous) part, comes only from oak barrels. Here you have winemaking. No grape variety intrinsically delivers a vanilla scent. It comes only from oak.

The least definitive – but no less real – are mineral or stony scents and tastes. These come from the soil, or so it is classically thought, anyway. No one has proved this scientifically. But winemaking can’t impart that stony scent or savor. And grapes don’t have it on their own, as proved by the absence of a mineral savor when the same grape is grown in soils that don’t deliver mineral scents or tastes, such as sandy soil, compared to chalk, slate, or granite soils.

Compare a chardonnay grown in the chalky soil of the cool Chablis district to one grown in the gravelly soil of the cool northern end of Monterey County’s Salinas Valley and you’ll see – or rather, taste – what I mean.

Divining the source of a wine’s goodness is no easy thing, especially these days, when winemaking has become such a powerful tool, capable of transforming (or distorting) everything an experienced taster might imagine to be “true” about a grape variety or a district.

Once, experienced wine drinkers felt quite certain of why a wine tastes as it does. But today you’d be well advised to be cautious in making definitive pronouncements.

That acknowledged, one thing is still certain: Fine wines taste like they come from somewhere. Mediocre wines taste like they could come from anywhere. They are interchangeable. However unscientific this “sensation of somewhereness” may be, you can trust it all the same.

HERE’S THE DEAL

ADRIANO “ESTATE BOTTLED” RED 2003, ADRIANO RAMOS PINTO It’s usually assumed that inexpensive wines don’t offer much in the way of character. Although that’s usually a good bet, it’s not inevitable. The price of a wine is more a function of the market than it is some sort wine version of predestination where if you are cheap you are doomed to banality.

The brand-named red wine called Adriano is an example of why a theology of price predestination has no place in wine buying. Here’s a wine that has plenty of character yet its price is humble. You would not think it among the elect.

Yet here price is just a reflection of Portugal’s lowly status on the international wine market. (Italy once suffered the same injustice.) Adriano is a red wine composed of the wonderful indigenous red grape varieties that create port wines, a blend of touriga francesa (30%), tinta roriz (30%), tinta barroca (30%), and touriga nacional (10%). Grown in the granitic soil of the Douro Valley, these grapes, coupled with that distinctive soil, render a red wine like no other on the planet.

Is this a refined red wine that will shoulder aside your beloved pinot noir or cabernet sauvignon? Not at all. Instead, Adriano is a rich, intense red wine with – if you’ll forgive the oxymoron – a refined rusticity. You can taste the granitic soil in the wine’s minerality. The local grapes give it a savor like no other: spicy, sun-ripe from the Douro Valley’s warmth, and filled with scents and tastes of blackberries, plums, and hints of leather. Above all, it tastes like it comes from somewhere. All that for $9.99 a bottle. This is an ideal red for meat loaf, pasta dishes, pizza, sausages, and other lusty foods.

ALQUEZAR MORISTEL “SOMONTANO” 2004 The Iberian peninsula is chockablock with inexpensive yet characterful wines. Here’s another red, made from the obscure indigenous red grape called moristel, that will wow you with its originality and impress you with its low price.

The story on Alquezar is really one of an ambitious American importer of Spanish wines, Classical Wines, working with the local grower’s cooperative of Somontano, a district at the base of the Pyrenees mountains in northern Spain. The grower’s co-op controls the great majority of the old moristel vines in the zone. In the last 15 years, the American importer has helped define and refine the production.

Initially, the moristel wine was a bit like Beaujolais nouveau. But this 2004 bottling is more serious and substantive. This is dense, rich, structured red wine redolent of the loganberry scent and taste of moristel, but with real backbone and depth. It’s still fruity and easy down the gullet, but with distinctive, original character. At $12.99 a bottle, it’s well worth searching out.