Freshness: The Secret Is in the Balance
Last week I was in Germany again — another ProWein, probably the most important fair for wine producers. Visitors alone number more than 60,000, from 142 different nations. Around 6,900 companies exhibited, from 64 different countries. And we, Portugal, were well represented: we took 387 companies to show the world the good wine made here. This was the 25th edition of the fair, in Düsseldorf, and this year even the prime minister, António Costa, paid us a visit.
Returning to Germany once more reminded me that it is a country which has decisively shaped my path — one that has, and always will have, a connection to what I chose to do with my life. It was in Geisenheim — Wiesbaden — that I did my Erasmus, in 2001. During ProWein I found myself thinking that it was on German soil that I wrote my final degree thesis, on a viticulture subject. And it was there, too, that I awoke to the importance of acidity in a wine — not only for the elegance and liveliness it can bring, but also as one of the most important elements in the longevity of any wine.
They are rarely talked about outside oenology, but the truth is that a wine’s acids are, together with pH, the element responsible for its sensation of freshness.
Basically, it works like this: a wine with higher acidity and a relatively low pH has far more ageing potential than a wine of similar character but with lower acidity and higher pH. pH measures the degree of relative acidity versus relative alkalinity of any liquid. It runs on a scale from 0 to 14, where 7 is neutral and below 7 is acidic. So a white wine at pH 3.0 will, under similar conditions, have greater ageing potential than a white at pH 3.5 — and, of course, it will give a greater sensation of freshness (acidity).
If oenology is to be the scientific path to reaching an expression of terroir and, ultimately, an expression of art through the many decisions a winemaker takes to make a wine, then the acidity of any wine must be understood within the complex matrix of the elements that make it — alcohol, tannins, extract. When that is so, acidity and pH in balance with the rest are able, beyond longevity, to create the elegance that great wines must have.
Nothing happens by chance. No element of a good wine is there, and in that measure, simply because. The secret lies in the perfect balance between the various elements. And it is the result of that balance that can turn a good wine into a great one.
From the page to the glass
- Cabo da Roca Reserva Arinto — Arinto at 20 metres, picked in the last week of August. Citrus, minerality, salt.
- Monte Cascas Malvasia de Colares — Ungrafted Malvasia rooted in sand, a kilometre from the Atlantic.
- 1808 Sauvignon Blanc — Sauvignon Blanc at 550 metres, where cold nights hold the aromatics.
