Wine Words: Minerality – Decoding Wine Speak And Tasting Notes

This is a controversial one. Minerality is a term steeped in more self-regarding, pretentious pseudo-science and wine speak gobbledygook that almost any other.

What the hell is minerality in wine? What are we smelling and tasting when we use this word, or is it merely shorthand for not having anything meaningful to say?

Mineral wines tend to be taut, linear, fresh and savoury. Fruit, when present, is usually reserved or, at least, taking a back seat – think about a quality Muscadet as an example. Mineral characters might include notes of chalk, slate, flint or even salty notes.

It is easy to associate minerality with acidity as so many of the characteristics mentioned so far are redolent of freshness and tension. However, high quality examples of notoriously low acid varieties, such as Marsanne and Roussanne present a mineral note in terms of a mouth-watering saline character.

So, if minerality is not solely a function of acid, is it purely the preserve of white wines, as they seem to be the only examples cited so far? No, that is not the case either. Lower acid reds, such as Grenache-based Chateauneuf-du-Pape and Gigondas, often have a mineral element on the finish. Higher acid reds can equally show minerality, be it the gravelly notes of Pessac Leognan reds, the graphite of Pauillac or the ferrous characters of Gevrey Chambertin. At a greater extreme, reds from volcanic soils frequently have a prominent mineral spine to their structure.

Interestingly, minerality seems to be something tactile – felt in wine’s structure – as often as it is a character of aroma or flavour.

Minerality, it seems, is going to elude an easy definition, although I hope we can all recognise at least some of the elements discussed from wines that we know and enjoy.

Where does minerality come from?

Science tells us that it is certainly not vine roots hoovering up literal minerals from the soil and transmitting them to grapes, from where they find themselves into our bottles of Chablis. However, it remains a compelling idea that Chablis’ soil of decomposed sea creatures, prehistoric seabed and fossils provides a direct link to the wines’ famous notes of oyster shells, sea breeze and ozone.

A well-known manifestation of minerality is the whiff of gun smoke or struck flint on the nose of old school Domaine Leflaive or Coche-Dury. Similar notes are frequently found in contemporary Yarra Valley Chardonnay. A related smoky note can increasingly be found in red Pinot Noirs today, including those of Comte Liger-Belair. These characters are now widely recognised and identified as reduction characters. Or, more correctly, characters of reduced sulphur dioxide.

Reduction probably deserves its own Wine Words but reduced SO2 characters often emerge when yeasts are stressed during fermentations. Fermentation yeasts become stressed when they have insufficient access to nutrients, the most common of which is nitrogen, from the crushed grape must they are trying to ferment. Grapes draw their nutrient content from the soil, absorbed via a vine’s root system.

Soil composition and chemistry – the presence of some minerals and elements can ‘bind’ nutrients and limit their availability to plants – therefore has a direct impact on reduced sulphur compounds in wine, which are often perceived as mineral characters.

Wine words are laced with imprecision and pseudo-science but sometimes it is both convenient and sort of liberating to embrace that. Terroir and minerality are about as vague as each other and they are also quite closely linked. A gravelly soil does not give Chateau Haut Brion its ‘hot rocks’ character and fossilised shellfish do not make Chablis taste of oyster shells. At the same time the soils, the terroir, of these vineyards may have a direct link to these characters through indirect pathways of nutrient availability and subsequent reduction characters. I do not have a neat and simple definition of minerality but I choose to talk about it as a terroir character. From the Mosel’s slate promoting a quality of acidity that gives Riesling of a steely minerality to the saline austerity of a Barolo Vigna Rionda, these are site-derived, non-fruit characters that we experience in our glasses.