The Colors of Wine
Michael Jobling, traveling winemaker, leads us on a virtual wine tasting through the senses and where surprise guest, color, plays a nuanced but critical role.
Image by Corina Rainer
One of the most common things that I hear from people just beginning their exploration into the world of wine is the struggle for vernacular…
…the very difficult nature of articulating smell, taste, and one’s feelings around the tangible yet mercurial gustatory experience that is wine.
Some of us smell an immersive memory (a tip of the hat to the olfactory), while others join fruit and flavor, weaving an intricate web of ripeness, spices, and even soils to describe our experience (oh, gravel, how I love you so). But so many of us begin in the most common of spaces, where wine tastes like wine, and smells like grapes.
So, how does one begin this deep dive into the senses? How do we go from tasting grapes and grape juice to smelling memories and pontificating about the perfect granularity of sand in one's mouth? The answer, my dear friends, may lie in one of the most surprising of commonalities —color.
Color is persistent across all of a wine's sensory schools: smell, taste, memory, age, origin, and even body.
In fact, many of a wine's most precise and obscure characteristics can be discovered simply by latching onto the various colors that frolic alongside your vinous nectar. Fruits, flowers, spices, vegetables: each possesses varying shades and symbols, uniting together to march us through a procession of flavor, smell, and feeling. Ponder for a moment, your favorite color or, perhaps, your least favorite. How many edible, or inedible ingredients come to mind when focusing on a single color? How many fruits, vegetables, spices, and herbs share the color red or green? What about purple or blue or yellow? Do they all taste and smell the same?
Image by Max Delsid
For instance, what might begin simply as a “red” wine may, in the end, reveal itself to be possessing an array of reds, garnets, violets, and burgundies.
While a strawberry and a cranberry are almost identical shades of red, one would be hard-pressed to ignore the stark difference between the sweetness of one and the tartness of the other. The same could be said for a bouquet of yellow flowers, all appearing similar in color yet unique in their perfume.
White wines often lean on a backbone of citrus: green lime and yellow lemon coming to mind. These colors can be our stepping stone into a more robust expression of flavors and smells. But while citrus may be the first to the party, are not bananas, pineapples, mangos, kiwis, starfruits, and a vast array of melons also contained in this spectrum of green and yellow sorbets? Perhaps one of them is waiting slyly in the glass, awaiting our discovery.
This nuance, and a bold exploration of and yearning for it, is where we can truly harness our capacity for the language of wine.
Our ability to decipher, interpret, and articulate what we smell, taste, see, and feel is part of our primal connection to the self, and if we can continue to reach broadly and creatively, we may find ourselves in a more confident and colorful world. So, be bold! Taste the rainbow! And enjoy a glass of your favorite color.
—Michael Jobling, Guest Writer
Michael Jobling is a Seattle wine professional turned traveling winemaker. Always searching for obscure grapes and stories, you can find him pouring verticals in warehouses throughout Seattle or hauling his backpack through vineyards abroad.
