While preferences are subjective, taste is not: Identifying and describing what you are tasting and then deciding on an affinity or aversion to it is the biggest battle most people face when trying to talk about, order, or purchase wine. 

There is a lot of insecurity around this topic. It is as if just because we eat food all day long, we assume we automatically connect two sets of neurons in our brains: those that deal with the physical sensations of what is in our mouths and those that translate how to discuss them. Being able to notice what your tongue, mouth, and nose experience and then putting those into words is a skill, just like molding clay into sculptures, singing, playing sports, or anything else physical. It’s something some people have a natural affinity for, but everyone can learn.

Wine is made up of 800 to 1,000 or more different compounds. A compound, for those who haven’t been in eighth-grade science in a while, is a substance formed from two or more elements chemically unite in fixed proportions. Water is a compound of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, and makes up about 86 percent of the volume of a bottle of wine; the rest of the compounds are responsible for the flavors, textures, and colors of a wine. You can learn to taste many of them.

Every flavor is its own unique compound, but the same compounds can be found in all sorts of other things. Apples and grapes, for instance, share many of the same flavor compounds, including the flavor of apple. So, even though there aren’t actually apples in wine, the apple flavored compounds can be.

Compounds can interact with other compounds and create other compounds. The process of fermentation is a series of chemical reactions, doing just that, but even after bottling this process of change never stops and as time goes on more flavors are created (and some destroyed). This is why mature wines taste so different from young wines and gain complexity.

This week’s vocabulary is focused on just a few of the many terms that help connect what is physically in wine to what you might be able to perceive when you take a sip.

Acid: This is found in the flesh of grapes in varying types and amounts, depending on variety. Once a berry is formed, the acid quantity is set (for the most part), but with sugar accumulation as grapes ripen, the ratio of acid to sugar decreases. So there is more acidity in grapes from cooler climates or vintages, and less in warmer climates or vintages. Acid is responsible for keeping wine stable and free from pathogens. It is one of several structural components of wine, making it taste refreshing by stimulating your salivary glands, causing your mouth to water. The more saliva you produce after a sip, the more acid in the wine. A wine with low acidity, or low in relation to higher levels of alcohol, is said to be flabby. Low acidity in relation to sugar makes a wine feel syrupy. 

Alcohol: The main reason most people drink wine is because it contains alcohol — nectar of the gods, and all that. Grapes accumulate sugar through photosynthesis. Yeast converts sugar into alcohol, along with a few other minor by-products, like glycerol and carbon dioxide. The sunnier and warmer a growing region, the more sugar will be in each berry, the more alcohol will be produced. Therefore, most low-alcohol wines, usually under 14 percent alcohol by volume, come from cooler places, and high-alcohol wines usually come from warmer places. As another structural component of wine, if a wine’s alcohol is too high it is said to be hot, and can create a burning sensation in your throat.

Balance: This is the elusive, ultimate goal of makers of fine wine, and sometimes a subjective word to describe when all the components of a wine — its flavor concentration, alcohol, acid, body, tannin (in the case of red and orange wines), and sugar (in the case of sweet wines) — are aligned so that no one element feels or tastes out of place. 

Body: This describes the mouth feel of the weight of the wine on your palate and is a structural component. A good metaphor is dairy. Cream is heavy, round, mouth-coating, dense, and full bodied. Down the ladder, there is half and half, which is still moderately full but less than cream; 2 percent milk, arguably a medium-bodied beverage; and 1 percent, on the lighter side of milk’s spectrum. Finally, there is fat-free milk, a little thin, watery, less flavorful, very light bodied, maybe too light for some. Alcohol and glycerol, a byproduct of fermentation, are heavier than water and correlate to a full-bodied wine, but fruit concentration, sugar, and tannin also come into play, adding or subtracting from the weight of the finished wine. 

Corked: An often very misunderstood wine flaw that unfortunately affects 3 to 5 percent of wines. It’s the pejorative term for 2,4,6-trichloroanisole or TCA, a compound found in wood and wood products, including cork bark, used to make corks as closures for wine bottles. Humans can have an extremely low threshold for detecting TCA, and it can make wine smell like wet cardboard, wet dog, musty, or just completely lacking in fruit flavors. It does not mean a cork is dry or crumbly or has fallen into your wine bottle. Those can, but often do not, lead to other issues. If you think a wine you are tasting is corked, do not drink it. It won’t hurt you, but any reputable retailer or restaurant will take it back. Just re-cork the bottle and bring it back for a replacement, refund, or credit.

Dry: Possibly the most divisive concept in wine is that of sugar. Dry simply means the absence of sugar, as in the opposite of sweet. Almost all fine wine in the world is intentionally made in a dry style. This means most if not all of the sugar has been fermented into alcohol, and the tiny bit left over, unfermentable sugars, are below the threshold for humans to taste. Some dry wines leave the impression of sweetness for a couple of reasons. They might be especially fruity, and because we often associate fruit flavors with sweetness our brain tells us the wine is sweet. Or they might have very high alcohol, equalling extra glycerol, which does taste sweet (but is still not sugar). Winemakers can choose to keep some sugar in their finished wines, stopping fermentation, leaving us with off-dry wines, like Kendall Jackson Chardonnay Vintner’s Reserve, with 20 grams/liter of sugar. 

Fruity: Grapes are fruit, and all wines will have some fruity flavors ranging from citrus to tree fruit to tropical in whites, and red to purple to blue to black in reds. The flavor compounds in those fruits are the same as those in your wine. As wines age, either in a cellar or bottle, the fruit will gradually change into more earthy, less fruit-centric notes. A wine that tastes of nothing but fruit is called a fruit bomb.

Funky: A catch-all term for weird flavors in wine that might not fall into the normal fruity/earthy spectrum. They can be positive or negative, depending on the individual’s preferences or tolerances. Examples of funky flavors are barnyard, poop, cat pee, yeast, mouse, earthy, mushroom, or bandaid. Often wines infected with brettanomyces, or brett, a beer-making yeast, are described as funky.

Minerality: A difficult term, as its definition or application is not always agreed upon by wine drinkers. It is meant to cover the flavors not derived from fruit, oak or yeast in wines. They are said to come from the soil, because they leave an impression of rocks, stones, soil, chalk, iron, metal, water, or other mineral elements. But there is a lot of research negating the concept of mineral flavors being derived through the roots of grape vines and ending up in the finished wine. Many people feel flavors often described as mineral come from reductive winemaking techniques, like those employed in Burgundy that can make a wine smell or taste like flint or matchstick, but in a pleasurable way. Wines from Europe are said to have more mineral flavors rather than the fruity counterparts in the Americas or Australia.

Primary flavors: The flavors in a wine that come directly from the grape itself, rather than from winemaking or maturation. They include all of the fresh fruit notes along with some that are mineral or earthy, depending on the varietal and the origin of the wine. Young wines have mostly primary flavors.

Secondary flavors: These are the flavors that are imparted to wine from winemaking. The type of yeast used, whether wild or cultivated, can dictate flavors from earthy to specific fruit notes. Wines left in contact with their yeast can pick up its flavor, and after nine months or so reactions can start to occur leading to more flavors like brioche, yogurt, and green apple. Fermentation temperatures that are too cold with white can give banana or pear drop; too hot can lead to cooked tropical notes in white or jam in red. 

Oak is the most popular method of imparting flavors; you can get notes of wood, toast, vanilla, chocolate, dill, coconut, spice, nuts, smoke, and many more. Malolactic fermentation or MLF can lead to butter and cheese. A red wine process called carbonic or semi-carbonic maceration gives extra fruity wines that taste like bubblegum or banana. Wines that have not been fined or filtered before bottling can also have a little extra complexity sometimes because of it. All wines have some sort of secondary flavors, but they vary from less to more dominant depending on the choices a winemaker implements.

Tannin: These are found in the skins, seeds, and stems of grape vines (and a bunch of other natural things like wood, coffee, chocolate, tea, and walnuts) and end up in red or orange wines. They are polymers of compounds that help preserve wines and also bind with the protein in saliva to wick away the moisture and leave your mouth with a drying, sometimes astringent sensation. As a structural component they can give wines a chew or edge and offer a dynamic counterpoint to acid, which creates saliva, that the tannins then bind with. 

The highest-tannin grape is Tannat, but Nebbiolo and Cabernet Sauvignon are also high in tannin and are partly responsible for the long aging potential of those wines. Low-tannin grapes are Gamay, Barbera, or Petite Sirah, and they generally don’t age well. Ripeness can affect the flavor of tannins, so unripe grapes can have mean, more astringent tannins than well- or over-ripened fruit.

Tertiary flavors: These are the flavors created from maturation of wines. All of those compounds in a bottle are continuously changing, albeit very slowly, and eventually create new compounds and different flavors; those are the tertiary ones. They can include nuts, dried fruit, mushrooms, soy sauce, leather, tobacco, coffee, chocolate, smoke, caramel, spice, and many, many more. 

Vegetal/Herbaceous: Some grape varieties have distinct vegetal or herbaceous flavors, Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc being the most famous, and distinct, examples. They both have higher levels of a compound called methopyrazine, which tastes like jalapeno or green bell pepper. Other varieties can have the same compound and their degree of ripeness, exposure to the sun, and specific growing temperatures can all affect the level of green, grassy, herbal, or vegetal flavors found in wines.

There are so many other words that can be used to describe wine. Not everyone has the same threshold for certain flavors, and it can take practice to identify those that are there. With practice — and I do mean practice — tasting wine, you may be able to pick up some of the more nuanced characteristics in your glass. 

Even without nuance, knowing what to look for ahead of time can help you drill down to what you are experiencing to decide whether you enjoy a particular wine.