What Makes a Quality Wine

If you read my post on the structural components of wine, you’ll have a basic overview of what comprises a bottle of wine. A logical next question is, “why do these things matter?” The answer is the components of wine harmonize (or not) with one another, and to a large extent, the amount of harmony amongst them is the foundation of a quality bottle. 

Before we get into our discussion of quality, I’ll clarify a few key points: 

  1. Good quality does not imply an expensive wine. It’s true, the best wines in the world are expensive. That does not mean that a wine must be expensive to be of high quality.
  2. A good quality wine does not imply an ageable wine. All ageable wines must be high quality wines, but the reverse is not true. In fact, the overwhelming majority of wines are neither ageable nor made with the intention of being aged.
  3. You can like a wine that isn’t of particularly high quality. If you drink it and say, “this is nice,” that’s a good place to be, even if the wine will never be recognized for its excellence.

With those caveats out of the way, we can get into discussing what makes a good quality wine. 

Like many things in life, determining the quality level of an object takes broad experience in that field. What better way to start getting that experience than to drink wine? The big key here is drinking intentionally. What are you looking for in your glass to assess quality? There are several factors, and we’re going to focus on four: Balance, Length, Intensity, and Concentration. 

Balance

Balance is the foundation for all other aspects. Without balance, none of the others really matter. When we speak about balance, we are focusing on how the structural components of wine work with one another. In short, is there an element of harmony in the wine? In white wine and most rosé: we’re focusing on alcohol, acidity, and flavor compounds. Red and orange wines, we need to consider tannins as well, both the level and type of tannin. Depending on the wine style, we might also need to consider residual sugar. We always need to consider it when  tasting sweet wines, but off-dry wines have residual sugar too. What we’re assessing is how these elements interplay with one another. For instance, if you’re tasting a Cabernet Sauvignon and your mouth puckers from the tannins, there’s intense heat on the back of your throat from the high level of alcohol, the acidity is moderate, and you find your palate overwhelmed by aromas of cooked fruits, but not much else, we would conclude this wine to be out of balance. The acidity is too low against the backdrop of intense tannins and high alcohol along with the presence of very ripe fruit, but no other flavor components. 

Let’s take another Cabernet Sauvignon. You taste the wine and you notice high amounts of ripe, but firm tannins. The alcohol is high too, around 14%. The acidity is high enough – the wine feels refreshing in your mouth. The flavors are at intense levels of red and black fruits and vanilla from oak. The two wines aren’t that different, but this one shows balance. No single component of the wine stands out against the others. 

Length

Length refers to how long the flavors of the wine lasts on your palate. Specifically, how long the “core” of the wine’s flavors last after you imbibe (or expectorate) the wine. For instance, if a wine has a lot of ripe red fruit, we’re looking for how long those fruit flavors stay (or potentially evolve) on our palate. If we drink the wine and then get a very bitter finish that we wish would dissipate, that does not contribute to length. Generally, length lasts a matter of seconds. A length of less than three seconds is short, between three and five is medium, and longer than five is long. Sometimes we can taste a wine hours later, but that’s not how we gauge length. (If you do have one of those wines that dances on your palate for hours, savor it and you can be pretty sure you found yourself a true gem!)

A related note: some people say finish when they mean length and vice versa. Finish is the last flavor note you observe. It’s how we create the bookend of length. We can describe the finish, but not count it. Length is measured in time. ***The two are not the same. Length is a measure of duration; finish is gauged by flavor. What is the last thing you experience with the wine? }

Intensity

Intensity is an experience of the wine’s aromas and flavor compounds. We measure it both on the nose and palate. To find the intensity of a wine on the nose, prior to swirling the glass, hold the glass fairly close to your face below your chin and move the glass upward, toward your nose (have a pour of 1.5-2 ounces (50-70 mL)). Once the glass is parallel to your chin, gently take a whiff through your nose. If you can clearly identify the wine’s aromas, the wine has high intensity. If you need to put your nose in the glass to detect a pale whiff of lemon, the wine is of low intensity. Most wines will fall between one of these two extremes. Now take a sip of the wine and draw air through the liquid. Generally, you’ll find the intensity on the nose matches that of the palate. You’ll likely notice new flavors as well, given retronasal flavors are more pronounced. Even with the different notes you find, the intensities should line up. In the event of discrepancy between nose and palate, your palate wins. 

Concentration

Concentration is the final category and it’s highly correlated with intensity. Concentration starts with color (how deeply colored is the wine?) and then works through flavor. Color is least important for a variety of reasons, the two primary are some thin-skinned varietals (in red wines) are quite pale, though the wine can be very concentrated. The second reason, and don’t tell anyone, but winemakers can make a wine a deeper color with the addition of a highly concentrated grape-based substance called MegaPurple. In most cases, however, a deeper hued wine can give you some hints into the wine’s concentration. Most color compounds are extracted during a pre-fermentation maceration (cold soak) and later with various methods to extract color during, and following, fermentation. These steps take time and cost money, so are often only used at length for higher quality wines. The concentration of flavor and aroma compounds also comes from various options during the rest of the winemaking process, which again take time and cost money. The most important factor, however, is how the grapes are cultivated. Grapes are finicky little things and need enough support to develop, but not too much or they ripen with no character. Yield management (the amount of grapes harvested per hectare), canopy management (arranging the shoots and leaves of a vine), nurturing the soil conscientiously, and managing various pests in service of the grapes all add time and costs to the bottle. They also make more concentrated grapes, that are expressive of their cultivation, an idea that is partially captured by the French word terroir

Now that we’ve assessed these four aspects of a wine, we have to put them together. While balance is the single most important of the four, you still need to have at least one of the other pillars to have a good wine. (Imagine a wine with low intensity of aromas, that lasted two seconds on the finish, and looked almost clear, but had perfect balance of low acid, low flavor, and low alcohol. The wine is balanced, but it isn’t a good quality wine.) As you go through each of the characteristics, the wine scores a “point.” If it has none of the above qualities, it’s a bad wine. Due to extensive and accessible knowledge of wine science, it’s unlikely you’ll come across bad wines in a store or restaurant. If it has only one, you’re looking at a wine that meets the bare minimum of quality, perhaps we’ll call it something simple like ‘okay.’ A wine you might drink to get drunk more than for pleasure. A wine with all four we would call “excellent” and know it is high quality. Most wines will probably have high marks in three of these categories. The tricky part as you get further along in your wine journey is understanding exactly where that wine’s attributes fit in in the wider world of wine. In a separate article, I’ll offer a more in-depth look at ways to assess wine quality. Wherever you are in your wine journey, you can make any glass a bit more fun by trying to assess it against the above criteria. Of course, you want to get better at assessing wine quality, but I think you’ll find, even if you’re wrong, going through this exercise as often as possible will help you enjoy and appreciate your wine even more.