Wine – a question of style | New Brief #250

“What is your favourite wine (or favourite region)?” I get asked this a lot, and it is an impossible question to answer. The last time someone asked, I realised a little later that I could have answered: “…but sometimes, I want a certain style of wine.” Somewhat vague, of course. I don’t have a favourite style, any more than a favourite wine or a favourite region. How could I? It feels single-minded in a wine world, which is anything but.

Even so, there are wine styles I like better than others right now, maybe because it’s summer. I am thinking of light red wines that are refreshingly fruity, juicy and easy-drinking. And it’s not just me. These wines are flying off the store shelves. Wines with great “drinkability” (buvabilité), as they say here in France. It may be a strange way of talking about wine, but it has become an accepted expression for wine that easily flows down the throat and that one is happy to drink more of. It’s not a style that suits everyone and not for every occasion, but I sometimes wish I had more of it in our cellar.

Grape varieties suitable for this lighter style of reds have thus also seen a surge in popularity, such as cinsault, grenache, the Chilean grape país and even the somewhat obscure Loire grape pineau d’aunis. But any grape will work. Even in Bordeaux, they make wines with great “drinkability”. We have tasted several easy-going cabernet sauvignons. Not to mention Cahors, which can produce wines far from the reputation of “the black wine”, refreshing and fruity. (This underlines the question whether “typicity” is a quality factor or even important. Is it a requirement to be typical to be of good quality? – more on this another time.)

A grape can thus have many styles. Aromatic white wines may appear to be summer wines. An intense nose can handle the competition from a fragrant garden. But there can be too much tropical fruit, as in some sumptuous sauvignon blanc, for example. Winemaker Niki Moser in Austria’s Kremstal dramatically said on our visit there last year, “I hate sauvignon blanc when it screams out its grape character” (read more in our article on Viticulture Moser). Seconds later, he served us a different version of sauvignon blanc, a wine with skin contact, a slight oxidation, and a few months in oak barrels (but not at all “orange”). You can do many things to change the style of a grape if you want.

Then there are grape varieties with an inherent mouthfeel, such as timorasso, roussanne, chenin blanc, sémillon and more. They produce wines with structure and (usually) without tropical fruit. Instead, they might have more of a “French fruit salad”, as Jacques Lurton in Bordeaux called it when we tasted his sémillon (article coming soon about my encounter with Jacques).

Wine styles have their fashion moments. Full-bodied, powerful, heavily oaked reds used to be fashionable, but not any longer. Now, fashion says elegant red wines with finesse, aged in stainless-steel tank or amphora. At least, that is what the experts say. But that does not prevent the oaky and powerful style from refusing to go away. Because there are many customers and producers who like the style and have not “understood” that it is out of fashion. Just because wine writers and sommeliers say something is trendy and modern, it is not necessarily what all consumers want.

So, what do you say? Do you have a favourite wine? A favourite district? Or perhaps a favourite style?

This is BKWine Brief number 250, a quarter of a thousand newsletters. Who would have thought it would arrive at that? Not us anyway. “The Brief” (some call it The Wine Brief) celebrated its twentieth anniversary last year. The first Brief was published in May 2003. Unfortunately, the anniversary passed a little too discreetly. Since then, we have published one newsletter every month, without missing a single month. We have also filled BKWine Magazine with articles and notices so that it is maybe one of the most well-filled and fact-packed wine site.

But we can even go back a bit further than 2003. Already in 1996, we started a site – home page, as it was called back then – about wine. Sweden’s first website about wine! BKWine Magazine a wine site with tradition.

Before that, we had a printed newsletter called VinNytt (WineNews).

Not only that. If you have an interest in wine tours, you can hardly find anyone who has more experience and can give you more knowledge and more fantastic experiences on a wine tour than BKWine. We organised our first wine tour back in 1986 and have since made many hundreds of wine tours.

Remember to visit BKWine Magazine online often this summer. We will be posting lots of extra reading in July.

Wine tours

If you want to join us on some really great and extraordinary adventures – once in a life-time wine tours – you can join us next winter on the extended Southern Hemisphere Tours: Chile-Argentina, South Africa and New Zealand.

More info on our wine tours here. “World’s Top Wine Tours“. Tours with the people who know wine and who have an unrivalled experience of wine and tours.

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Wine editors to the national encyclopedia, Forbes.com contributors, award-winning wine book authors, wine tour advisors to the UN and national wine organisations, wine judges … and, above all, passionate wine travellers.

Enjoy the Brief!

Britt & Per

Wine editors to the national encyclopedia, Forbes.com contributors, award-winning wine book authors, wine tour advisors to the UN and national wine organisations, wine judges … and, above all, passionate wine travellers.

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