What is a Nebuchadnezzar? What grape varietal is principally used in making Tokaji, the Hungarian dessert wine? What is the expression for removing immature grape bunches in order to decrease yield and improve sugar content in the remaining grapes at harvest time?
Asked to conduct a wine quiz at a dinner the other day, I was greeted with an audience that found the questions much too demanding. Yes, there were all wine lovers, many of them even fairly proficient about the subject.
It is possible they had had too much of the stuff to bother to get some questions right. Or maybe the subject is much too vast — wine is made with over 5,000 grape varietals and is influenced by diverse viticultural practices and less-than-straightforward wine-making techniques.
Hard liquors, despite market-driven attempts at mystification, are simple creatures. Vodka, for instance, is a combination of ethyl alcohol or ethanol (40 per cent) and water (60 per cent) — no more. This raises the obvious questions. Is there a basis for believing one vodka is better or smoother than the other? Are consumers justified in forking out so much more on their Grey Goose and Stolichnaya than their poorer cousins? Or are the world's vodka drinkers the victims of mass market-manufactured delusion?
Scientists who set out to address these very questions recently came up with the following findings. Discounting impurities in the water that could affect taste, our perceptions about different brands of vodka could be influenced by the shape of “hydrate clusters” — loosely, the alignment of molecular clusters of water, of ethanol, and of clusters of ethanol molecules surrounded by water molecules.
In short, the study concluded that there could be a scientific or chemical basis for consumers preferring one mixture of ethanol and water over another. But it is a depressing and unappealing explanation, one that suggests the basis for vodka brand preference rests on such things as whether it is more watery, that is, has more water molecule clusters than the other. And it ought to make anyone who believes he is a discriminating enthusiast of vodka — one who must have nothing but the ‘purest' and ‘silkiest' made from the ‘finest ingredients' — pause and think.
Wine — which undergoes many chemical changes in fermentation tank, barrel, bottle and even in your glass — is a living breathing thing. It is far more complex than hard liquor, which is possibly why there is so much intellectual curiosity about it. The more you learn about it, the more you learn how little you actually know.
If you don't have the time or are generally not disposed towards reading books, then quizzes, of which there are plenty online, are a great way to start learning about wine. I am totally addicted to the Wine Challenge, the biweekly quiz at the wonderful Wine Spectator site, which has a huge archive of questions (www.winespectator.com/quiz).
Try it. It could spark a new and enduring interest in the subject.
PS: The answers to the three questions at the top are a bottle that holds 15 litres of wine, Furmint, and a green harvest.
