Scary Words II: Minerality

This wine has stupendous aromas of liquor stones…

The term minerality is very controversial and highly discussed among the experts, but it has no scientific support. It is a way to describe wine that has subjective tastes and flavors. This said, minerality is a term useful to describe the wine in a metaphoric sense, a way to summarize a complex sensory feeling. Let’s check in this video what the sensations are that triggers the mineral feeling.

Thanks to Exquisit.cat for let me use their nice picture to illustrate the “minerality” term. 🙂

LATEST NEWS:

A recent study* identifies some chemical components that may exist in the mineral wines and they are not found in the non-mineral wines. The identification of these components may be useful in helping us better understand the group of sensations the experts refer when they talk about triggering the “mineral feeling”: these components, such as succinic acid, β-phenylethanol, γ-decalactone, 4-ethylphenol and 4-ethylguaiacol, are used to describe salty taste, rose, orange blossom, coconut character and animal notes. It is not clear at this time if these components can be attributed completely to the “mineral” as a descriptor. Anyway, it seems that science is now making strides to give us the scientific basis for the “mineral feeling”.

(*) Published in March 2015 (Spain) by Antonio Palacios García, director of Laboratorios Excell-Ibérica (Logroño), and David Molina, director of Outlook Wine (Barcelona)

4 Comments

  1. Fascinating research! It is all so interesting to learn about!

    Reply
    • Thanks! I will try to continue posting about “scary words”

      Reply
  2. wow, I didn’t know anything about minerality, find it very interesting 😉

    Reply

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