Wine Words: Energy – Decoding Wine Speak And Tasting Notes

At a recent Wanderthirst event – don’t know? Ask us! – in Singapore one of my table mates asked me to explain the use of the term ‘energy’ in tasting notes. This is certainly a word that is becoming more popular and gaining currency in wine speak.

I find myself using it more and more, and am noticing it being used increasingly by colleagues, friends and the professional critics. ‘Energy’ has become something I actively seek in quality wines and, when I find it, it’s a quality I reward with higher scores. But what on earth do we mean when we talk about wines with energy?

To my mind, energy is closely tied up with acidity in wine. In a vast simplification, it is relatively easy to understand a crisp white wine being described as having ‘brisk acidity’. ‘Brisk’, as in walking at a brisk pace, is suggesting of movement and momentum, and movement requires energy. I admire wines that show a clear progression from nose, to attack (when the wine first hits your palate), through the mid-palate and on to the finish. There is a sense of trajectory to a wine that clearly moves through this sequence and that too implies some degree of energy. Less fancifully, it is relatively easy to see how a wine can ‘ride’ on its acidity through to a long finish – a flabby wine, lacking in acidy, simply falling away on the back end.

There is more to it than this, though. A wine does not have to be a razor sharp Clare Valley Riesling, or a Vouvray loaded with the malic acidity of green apples, to display a sense of energy. There are plenty of lower acid wines, and red wines, that show lots of energy, so what else is at play here?

‘Essential Winetasting’ by Michael Schuster is one of the best books on the subject I know. As a student I attended several classes with Michael and I can think of few people who are better at identifying and communicating quality in wine. One thing I learned from Michael was to pay attention to a wine’s mid-palate in order to assess its quality. In very simple terms, hold a basic or entry level wine on your palate and you will basically have a mouthful of wine. Perhaps you will get one or two fruit impressions, but it is basically a dead weight. Take a mouthful of Chateau Rayas, Lafite or Dominus and you can expect fireworks on the mid-palate! I call it ‘snap, crackle and pop’, after a British breakfast cereal of my childhood, but it is mid-palate complexity that you are looking for: a wine that continues to evolve, change and hold your attention. You want spice, minerality, detail and a carrousel of different nuances. In other words, you are looking for energy.

Energy is a great tasting term, along with its synonyms like dynamism, ebb and flow, fluidity and so on. These take a bit of thinking about, as there is a subjective layer to them given the wine doesn’t actually carry an electrical charge, but I am confident that the sense of thrust – in a great Chevalier Montrachet or a Lafleur – is actually a more communicable quality than whether I taste wild raspberries and you find cassis.