What does "pure" mean?

[lleichtman]

Michael, Michael, Michael!

Tsk, tsk, tsk.

What kind of an idea is that?!

The words don’t really matter. We want the points!

I think you hope more with the totality of what you write to communicate your impression of what the wine was like and what you thought of it. Some terms really don’t make any literal sense (e.g. what do violets taste like?) but nonetheless can form one part of an overall successful communication from the writer/taster to the reader.

As usual, I agree with Chris.

Especially about the violets. After having read about violets in one too many tasting notes, one summer I got down and smelled every violet in my backyard just to see if I was missing something. We had mostly purple ones but also some white and lavender versions. They’re only about eight inches tall, so it’s not like the aromas are wafting around your nostrils unless you’re right down on the ground with them. They’re quite faint. You need to catch them in the morning before the sun burns off the oils. With roses, there are as many different scents from one variety to the next as there are different flavors in different wine grapes. Not much similarity between Riesling and Merlot. But I couldn’t distinguish as many different scents in the violets.

So I tried a few. You can eat both the flowers and the leaves. If you eat them, the flowers are slightly perfumed. Unless you eat a lot of different flowers, the best comparison most people would be familiar with is probably something very faintly like rose water, and they can have a very very slight acidic touch. But not really something you’d want in your wine, unless you like your wine to remind you of shampoo.

When you preserve them with sugar and use them to decorate your cake, they’re quite nice looking and they just taste like sugar.

My hunch, which may be dead wrong, is that most of the people who refer to them in tasting notes haven’t eaten or smelled many of them. That would make them borderline useless as precise aromatic or flavor descriptors. But I think that people refer to them to give an overall impression, rather than anything specific. Again, I may be dead wrong.

Thanks for the effort Greg. I have had that problem with flower descriptors in the past as well. What is white flower? Jasmines are white flowers but jasmine in wine might not be a great smell. As for roses, what type, dried or fresh, yellow flowers, I hope not. I often associate violets with my grandmother for some reason and she never inspired me to drink any wine but Manischewitz wine.

[lleichtman]

I understand “pure” as fruit unmasked by oak, mlf, etc

Are you saying that some wines come with milfs? What brands? A dishy Blonde? I’d like to “put wood to” (thanks, Anton) a milf that came with my wine! What a smashing idea! This is a better combination than medicated bandaids.

Watching too many porn videos?

[Pat_Burton]

I understand “pure” as fruit unmasked by oak, mlf, etc

Are you saying that some wines come with milfs? What brands? A dishy Blonde? I’d like to “put wood to” (thanks, Anton) a milf that came with my wine! What a smashing idea! This is a better combination than medicated bandaids.

Watching too many porn videos?

I think the second post in this quote is inappropriate. I like to think of wine berserker as welcoming to all. This is just an example of an old boys club. Or maybe it was posted on the wrong site?

[GregT]

Lawrence don’t get me started on the flower descriptors by color.

White flowers? Um, like various daisies, chrysanthemums, lillies, apple blossoms, peonies, zinnias, chamomile, tulips, daffodils, roses, magnolias, hydrangeas, lilacs, heliotrope, petunias, jasmine, wisteria, anemone, delphiniums, periwinkle, hyacinths, lupine, dogwood, cosmos, or something else? I’m just thinking about the things we had in the back yard, none of which smelled like each other. And don’t forget the orange blossoms.

There’s a smell for everyone. Welcoming to all!

Kelly - it’s true but you get retronasal from eating something. It has to be in your mouth.

[John_Morris]

How have you ever found time to practice law, Greg?

[GregT]

Look who’s talking!

[Jayson_Cohen]

BTW, in the German wine language we have the nice adjective “reintönig”. I don’t know any corresponding term in the English language, but the German oun “Reinton” means “pure tone”.

Is “Reinton” a musical term? I can see the analogy between a pure musical note and a pure wine.

(An anecdote Greg will like: As a teenager, a friend and I fed the audio output of a Judy Collins song through an oscilloscope and found that one of her sustained notes produced a perfect circle on the screen, meaning that she was singing a pure sine wave.)

Yes, “Reinton” is a musical term and indeed a sound with a sinus-waveform.

Single audible frequency. So I think you are right the closest English translation may be a pure tone, but it sounds (no pun intended) like connotation is different in German or the term more applicable outside the musical context. We’d just say pure in English. To quote a movie now on my mind: “the circle is now complete.”

[Marcus_Goodfellow]

While there definitely are some positive but ill-defined terms that wine writers employ to indicate that they like a wine, without all that precisely pinpointing what it is they like about it, I take “purity” to mean a clean, direct expression of fruit that is uncluttered by overt winemaking artifacts (i.e. oak, reduction, oxidative characteristics, etc, to say nothing of brettanomyces and volatile acidity).

But John’s definition also works

+1

I would add, though not a critic, that wines I view as “pure” often have an extra layer from “clean” or “direct expression of fruit” that evokes both a direct sense of the variety and the place. i.e. while I like Thomas Pinot Noir pure is not a word I would use. However, Evesham Wood Pinot Noir often has that sense of being pure. Cleanly made, expressing both Pinot Noir and the terroir of the vineyard.

I totally agree. I just used clean in a very positive way to describe your super terrific 2017 House block whistling. Something to the effect where nature and the winemaker are in balance, and the winemaker doesn’t ask too much from the grapes…

One of my favorite notes! And I agree, clean and pure, regardless of the clarity of the terms, are two of my highest compliments.