During aging, there’s another winemaking process that is sometimes utilized: fining. Fining helps remove excessive tannin, thus, hopefully, making the wine softer and less bitter, and improving its balance.

SYRAH

GRANITE A hard, mineral-rich soil that is composed of 40 percent to 60 percent quartz. The soil warms quickly and retains heat well. Thus, granite soils are ideal with acidic grapes like gamay. Granite is found in Beaujolais, as well as in the Cornas region of the northern Rhône Valley.

Thought to be more than two thousand years old, pinot noir (along with savagnin and gouais blanc) is considered one of the “founder varieties”—the great great grandparent of scores of other well-known grapes, from chardonnay and gamay to corvina and garganega.

But olfaction also happens at the back of the mouth—or, as it is technically called, retronasal olfaction.

As for taste, alcohol can impact wine in two ways that are negative. First, high alcohol can mask the flavors of the wine, rendering them virtually meaningless because you can’t taste them anyway. Second, a wine that’s very high in alcohol is a wine that has come from very ripe grapes. If the grapes are so ripe they border on raisins, the wine can

CHENIN BLANC

Before fermentation begins, the winemaker has another choice to make. Instead of proceeding immediately, he may decide to chill the tank down and let the juice “cold soak” for a few hours or days. During this time, the skins will ever so slowly and gently release a small amount of tannin, aroma, and flavor compounds. Since fermentation has not yet

FLINT Siliceous stone (sedimentary rocks that contain silica from silica-secreting organisms such as diatoms and some types of sea sponges) that reflects sun and heat well. The Pouilly-Fumé wines of the Loire Valley are generally produced from flint-based soils.