My father used to personal a small winery on a Hungarian volcano within the Balaton Uplands, the place vines have grown since Roman instances. Starting within the late nineties, he spent most weekends there, writing essays about politics and making white wine with Olaszrizling grapes. The wine tasted like lemony mineral water. He cherished it, even when his early efforts certified as guggolós bor (or “crouching-style wine”), an expression used to explain wine so terrible that guests crouch down when passing by its maker’s dwelling to keep away from being noticed and invited in for a drink.
The labels on my father’s bottles bore a quote from the Hungarian author Béla Hamvas, describing the area’s vineyards: “The kind of places where you can stop, sit down, settle in, and say: I am staying here. And perhaps without even realizing it, this is where death might find you.” Hamvas, who was banned from publishing in the course of the Communist regime and subsequently needed to work as a laborer at distant energy crops, died in 1968. But, in 1945, three years earlier than his banishment, he wrote “The Philosophy of Wine,” a treatise that adopted wine’s mysteries as an train in accepting the unprovable, meant to reconcile atheists and materialists with the divine. In the e-book, he asserted that wines from particular landscapes have an “inimitable mineral bouquet.” Ones from sandy soils, for example, fill our veins “with very small star-like grains, and these grains dance in our blood like the animated Milky Way.”
In 2010, due to changes in the political landscape, my father bought his winery and moved dwelling to Montreal, the place I reside. He has not been again since. Two years in the past, as I deliberate a visit to Hungary, he requested me to return to his outdated property to gather a bottle from his cellar. He defined, with enthusiasm, that he wished our household to uncork it at his funeral—an archetypal Magyar-émigré request. That summer season, after a number of days in Budapest, I drove two hours to the volcano, Mt. Szent György, to retrieve a few of my father’s 1997 classic. The winery’s new proprietor, a retiree named Attila, who summers on the volcano, had torn out many of the vines, contemplating them incapable of yielding something respectable. But our outdated cellar nonetheless stood there, beneath an immense walnut tree, and my dad’s inexperienced bottles lay simply the place he’d stated they’d be, in a nook, sinking into the filth. They have been encrusted with mould, lifeless wasps, beetle husks, and furry cobwebs. Attila recommended that I take two, in case one was corked, although once I did, he scoffed that each could be dangerous. “I don’t know why your apa could possibly want those,” he muttered, as we hosed them down.
On my approach again, I finished at Mt. Somló, a volcano not removed from Mt. Szent György, whose “fiery” white wines Hamvas described in rapturous phrases. While there, I visited a pal, Éva Cartwright, at her retailer, the Somló Wine Shop, which occupies a small stone cave constructed into the hillside beneath her household’s dwelling. When I realized that she’d by no means tried a Hungarian white this outdated, we determined to open one of many two bottles I’d picked up. Neither of us held out a lot hope. My father had warned me that the wine would in all probability be “broken,” a Hungarianism for wine that falls someplace between vinegar and sherry. But his Olaszrizling was greater than high-quality. It had remodeled into one thing else, smoky and crystalline, with beguiling undertones that tasted, I used to be certain, like ash.
Winemaking is usually a exact science, but it surely additionally depends on mysteries, accidents, and artistry. How sure parts—barrel alternative, fermentation, and the ripeness of grapes when they’re picked, amongst different issues—produce explicit results is pretty properly understood, however, generally, traits nonetheless emerge with out clear antecedents. Hamvas’s competition that totally different bodily landscapes produce distinctive tastes speaks to one of the intriguing qualities that has come to be related to wine: “minerality,” a nebulous idea that often refers to a sort of chiselled stoniness. Many minerally wines are excessive in acidity, with a pointy, savory presence that verges on saltiness. Some have a powdery texture, as if saturated with pulverized quartz mud or pencil lead. These sensations evoke earthen matter, like iron, slate, or gem stones. The style and aroma can set off associations of the seashore, or freshly fallen rain.
Although the phrase “minerality” appears to have first crept into winespeak within the seventies and eighties, it wasn’t till the early two-thousands that it took off. In the previous twenty years, it has turn out to be one of the frequent descriptors within the wine world. Lately, you could find a wine characterised, in all seriousness, as having “mineral flavors sexed up by a flinty nuance on the end,” providing “a granite quarry’s worth of minerality,” or in comparison with “sucking on a pebble.” The time period’s recognition has probably been aided by its ambiguity. In 2013, French researchers discovered that wine professionals who have been requested to outline minerality usually offered contradictory definitions. When it first appeared in “The Oxford Companion to Wine,” a cherished encyclopedia of the wine world, in 2015, its editor, Jancis Robinson, wrote that the phrase was “too prevalent to ignore—even if impossible to define.”
The time period probably advantages, too, from the idea, fed largely by promoting, that liquid that has run via rocks is more healthy, extra “pure,” or in any other case improved. Bottled-water corporations have lengthy alluded to the affiliation of mineral springs—our bodies of water that include dissolved geological minerals within the type of parts, like sodium or magnesium, and salts like sulfate—with healthfulness, and have highlighted how their delicate variations in taste outcome from the presence of those supposedly therapeutic minerals. There is, after all, an vital distinction—spring water has been in direct contact with rocks, whereas crushed grapes haven’t—however the ubiquity of images suggesting that rocks might be absorbed by water has probably helped prime folks to consider that the identical might be true of different liquids.
The standard account of minerality’s origins holds that the style is the results of hint parts from the soil being absorbed by the plant’s roots, transported into the grapes via the trunk and stems, after which persisting within the completed wine itself. It’s a captivating notion, but it surely violates some important tenets of soil science. Because rocks, akin to limestone and schist (to take two examples often cited as sources of minerality) are solids, their being taken up instantly by a vine’s roots is a bodily impossibility. Though grapevines, like all crops, take in mineral vitamins, within the type of ions, from the water they draw from soil, these vitamins come from a variety of sources, together with humus, the broken-down remnants of natural matter; any chemical components, like fertilizers; and mum or dad geological minerals which have dissolved via weathering. Trace quantities of those mineral vitamins do in the end make their approach into wines, but it surely’s not clear that they’re current in adequate portions to be perceptible to the human palate.
Alex Maltman, a professor emeritus of earth sciences on the University of Aberystwyth, in Wales, is a vociferous critic of the notion that rocks are one way or the other a supply of minerality. In 2012, he revealed an article within the Journal of Wine Research that cited research concerning the presence of minerals in wine and water going again to 1955 and concluded that “whatever minerality is, it cannot literally be the taste of minerals in the vineyard rocks and soils.” Although his tutorial writings are usually measured—in that paper, he acknowledges that additional research may present soil to have a minor, oblique, complicated, distant impact on taste—his casual statements can appear extra combative. In the course of our interviews, Maltman known as minerality “a mental construct,” and in contrast the notion that it’s derived from the soil to a perception that’s “rather like a religious faith.”
