Vertical wines

Science tells us that 'mineral wines' do not exist, so to avoid talking nonsense it would be better to refer to vertical wines.

As many DoctorWine readers know, I do not like the term “mineral wines” and the reasons for this are simple. Minerals are the metals and non-metals that exist in the Earth’s crust and they are not volatile, which means they have no odor. And there are no traces of them in their natural state in wine. When we sense odors of flint or sulfur, the substances responsible for them have nothing directly to do pyrite or sulfur but depend on different compounds, for examples acids and thiols which are volatile and thus also generate odors. Thus they are not “mineral”.

I understand that a term like “mineral” in describing a wine can be a figure of speech and so, I wonder, why not use less ambiguous adjectives which are immediately comprehensible and avoid any risk of confusion? One of the terms that I use, and which I encourage my collaborators to use, in place of “mineral” is “vertical”, which is more or less the same thing and more appropriate even if it has more to do with taste than smell. Verticality is an image, it has to do with sight, and images are useful to relate different sensations and give an idea of what one experiences through taste and smell.

The vocabulary of a sommelier already includes terms like “rounded”, “soft” and “edgy” which derive from a similar conceptual reality and adopt visual images or tactile sensations. And they relate well the flavors and balances found in wine. The term “vertical”, in my view, is equally efficient to describe a wine where the acidity, tension and agility dominate the mouthfeel. And it evokes situations that help explain something that, like a flavor, is very difficult to explain in words.

Furthermore, when a Champagne is “vertical”, aside from its acidity exalted by the presence of carbon dioxide, it recalls the gothic cathedrals of that region with their spiral bell towers that reach for the sky just like the bubbles do, rising “vertically” towards the atmosphere. It is an image that brings together many aspects, even cultural and humanistic ones, and which express a concept well. And this without the veiled rhetoric implied, in my view, in the term “minerality”, which can mean everything and nothing and that, I suspect, can hide with a trite term a lack of an appropriate definition.