Words can help you understand wine

Legs, Nose and Hips

What is it about all those anatomical terms people use when they describe wines? Can't they just say they liked or didn't like it?

First of all you will have noticed that wine, unfortunately, is very much about snobbishness. That means people wanting to flout their superiority tend to use obscure jargon to show they know more about the magic elixir than you do. So a lot of jargon is employed to intimidate those of us who don't know what the jargon means. We're smarter than that, aren't we? We know there are only two types of wine--those we like and those we don't.

Still, a little language can help communication, so let's tackle a bit, shall we?

First, legs. Wine doesn't walk, so how can it have legs? Well, when you pour wine into a glass, roll it around inside the glass. See what happens? The wine clings to the side of the glass in streaks, slowly flowing down the sides of the glass. These streaks are called "legs" and the more pronounced the streaks, the better the legs. What does this tell us about the wine? Well, the thicker the legs, the greater the glycerine content of the wine. Glycerine is a natural byproduct of the fermentation process and the higher the alcohol the higher the glycerine. So "great legs" indicates higher alcohol. If you've been reading us for a while you'll know we are not necessarily fans of high alcohol wines. Still legs are nice, although I've always been more of a breast man (who said that?).

How about nose? Obviously that refers to the smell of the wine. But who cares about smell? I am not going to wear it as perfume.

It turns out that our sense of smell is many hundreds of times more acute than our sense of taste. In prehistoric times the way we knew something wasn't good to eat was by smelling it, not tasting it. Smelling was an early warning system to keep us alive. So smelling wine before we taste it tells us a lot about how the wine will taste.

And smelling wine is an art in itself. You need the right glass with a generous bulb and not too much wine in the glass. You need to swirl the wine vigourously around the glass to get as much oxygen into the wine as possible. And you need to dig your nose right down into the glass and take several short, sharp breaths. Don't give up. Keep swirling and sniffing. You'll notice the aromatics change the more air you swirl into the wine. Sniff again. Slowly the wine will open and reveal its true aroma. Don't give up. There are those who think the smell of a wine is an even greater pleasure than the flavour. In fact the best sniff comes from the empty glass, its inner surfaces coated with wine and giving off the richest aroma.,

I often see wine neophytes giving the most prefunctory sniff and swirl and getting right down to drinking. I am here to tell you that wine aromas are a pleasure all unto themselves. Enjoy them with as much fervour as you enjoy the flavour. And those of you who don't drink because of allergies of any sort, you can always enjoy the aroma of a wine.

How about hips? I had never heard the term before until a friend, a wine neophite himself, came to dinner. As we were sampling various wines and describing the legs and nose, he started to pronounce them as having "hips" or "no hips." I asked what he meant, and he said it referred to whether the wine had a distinctive style.  If the wine was mass-produced plonk, it may have good legs and good nose but no hips.

When he ran across small-batch, hand-made wines, wines that were stylistically distinctive, he pronounced the wine to have "good hips." We all liked the expression and immediately started commenting on the "hips" of the wines we were enjoying that night.

So, may you always enjoy wines with "good hips."

Cheers!

Keith