Wine Words: Balance – Decoding Wine Speak And Tasting Notes

Wine tasting students are taught to assess quality in terms of BLIC, that is Balance, Length, Intensity and Complexity. Personally, I think it’s notable that balance comes first as it is probably the most important factor of quality: it doesn’t matter a lot to me if a wine has 700% new oak or 18% alcohol, as long as it’s balanced.

Balance is key to quality, but what are we actually talking about?

Balance is concerned with the interplay of a wine’s various elements or ‘building blocks.’ At the basic level these might be acid, sugar, alcohol and tannin (in reds). Oak, where it has been used, has a place in the conversation. I am also going to add what I call ‘fruit profile’ which encompasses the weight, density and concentration of fruit, this is broadly analogous to a wine’s ‘body.’

So, a wine’s balance is the equilibrium it achieves between these various factors. If we take Vintage Port as an example, it needs acidity to balance its sweetness, sweetness and weight of fruit to counteract its tannin, and more of the same to balance the alcohol. That might be a reductive example, but it illustrates how different elements might intersect to create balance and – more importantly? – identifies some of the factors that require balancing.

When describing a wine with particularly admirable balance I often use the word poise and this raises a secondary question. Surely balance is a binary concept? The tightrope walker is either on the rope or not; and even if they’re wobbling around like Crusty the Clown, they have already lost balance.

If this is the case, how can some wines show better balance than others?

This comes down to an intersection between quality and style and it starts to become clearer as I consider the wines I feel show the ‘best’ balance:

• The effortless, balletic poise of a great Mosel Spatlese.
• The pitch-perfect harmony and precision of a 2008 prestige cuvee Champagne.
• Petrus 2022, tasted recently, which was a wine of such brooding, monstrous power, which had such a searing tannic architecture, and yet had not a hair out of place and showed impeccable balance as all those elements resolved on the finish.

It turns out there can be a reconciliation between balance being binary and there existing different levels of balance. It is the same distinction between watching a man stand on one leg and marvelling at angels dancing on the head of a pin.

In terms of Wine Words, the important thing is the qualifier. Marking blind tasting exam papers, I struggle to reward candidates who simply describe a wine as ‘balanced’ or who even comment on ‘good balance.’ I want to know what is balanced, or what is good about its sense of balance. Once we get into the knife-edge precision of a scintillating young Chablis, or the effortless harmony that characterises Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, then we start to decode what is meant by balance in tasting notes.