What makes a premium quality wine?
Anyone who has ever explored the wine aisle at the grocery store or the wine selection at a liquor specialty store has come to find that there can be a vast price difference. Depending on your budget and tastes, you can spend between six and six thousand dollars on a bottle of wine. Most people aim for something in the middle, but why is there this disparity? What makes some wine so much more expensive and better tasting than other wines?
Many factors go into making and producing high quality wine and those factors are typically responsible for the quality, and therefore price, of a bottle of wine.
Age of the wine
As most people know, wine gets better with age. The longer the wine sits without being opened, the more it’s flavors change and evolve. Not necessarily every wine benefits from aging, but a wine that is well aged has less acidity and fewer tannins, so the wine becomes smoother to drink.
There are sometimes years that are better than others, but overall most people agree that an aged wine is better. For example, you may pay $4 for a wine that was aged for about a year in French and American oak barrels. But a $900 wine may have been aged in new Bertranges French oak barrels for years.
Location of the vineyard
Where the wine was created, produced and aged has a lot to do with it’s quality. The best wine-making grapes come from vineyards where the vines struggle to produce fruit and where the vines are grown on a hill with soil low in nutrients and close to a river. Napa Valley winemaker Aaron Pott has been quoted as saying “If you get it right in the vineyard, even a trained squirrel could make good wine.”
Some of the best vineyards in the world are in Napa Valley, California; Bordeaux, France; Mendoza, Argentina; Tuscany, Italy; Barcelona, Spain; and Yarra Valley, Australia. You can often tell off the bat that a wine will be good if it was produced in a vineyard in these areas.
Balance of Wine Making
The winemaking process is where a lot of the first two factors can break down. “In the hands of an overzealous, tech-loving winemaker, beautiful grapes can transform into a wine that tastes like a mouthful of vanilla and butter with no hint of the natural goodness that came from the land.
For a wine to taste good, there has to be a good balance between the amount of:
- Acidity
- Tannins
- Alcohol
- Sugar
All of these things greatly affect the flavor and aroma in the wine. A high quality wine should not overwhelm you with the taste of oakiness, butter, alcohol, sweetness or acidity. These wines should promote the natural flavor of the grapes, not mask them with stronger flavors.
Many people think that all wines are more or less the same - just sweet grape juice with some alcohol. But a lot goes into making a premium quality wine. Once you taste one and look for ripe fruit flavors, spicing earth, notes of acidity and more, you’ll begin to see that each bottle is special.
