Wine
Barry Smith
What is minerality?
The most over-used word in the world of wine is the ill-defined term “minerality.” I have mentioned it before in this column when talking about tasting terms but it deserves closer scrutiny.
Although talk of minerality has wide appeal for producers, wine merchants, wine critics and sommeliers, and is often seen as a mark of quality, it’s a relatively new wine term, having arisen in the 1990s. There is no entry for it in Ann Noble’s wine aroma wheel or Emile Peynaud’s classic text, The Taste of Wine. (Though the latest edition includes a note on it and there is a new entry in the fourth edition of The Oxford Companion to Wine.) There is, however, no agreement on its meaning, or which wines show the most minerality and certainly no basis to the claim that we can taste the soils of the vineyards.