Hey, You! Look in the door of your fridge, or on that cracked tray you call your bar. See that bottle of vermouth? Remember when you opened it? I didn’t think so. Well, it’s time to throw it out.
It is not kryptonite, you know, only fortified wine with herbs added. They did this originally to make awful wine palatable. Then, for a while, they decided it was medicinal (The flu, sure, that's what I'm taking it for...) Then the martini was born and for the next eighty-seven years people bought vermouth, opened it and ignored it.
But vermouth is not just for leaving out of martinis. Dubonnet straight up may leave me cold, but at a co-op in Spain, I tasted vermouth that blew my socks off. It was a thick, concentrated red wine; tannic, a little sweet and perfumed with wild flowers and field herbs like lavender, caraway and dusty sage. Apparently many European wineries make their own version. Alas, almost none of it gets to the States.
Vermouth is one definition of “aromatic wine.” But what I had planned to write about was what wine schools and books refer to as “The Aromatic Grapes,” namely…um…
[error code 369v2!! That function not available!!]
(Note: this error pops up when wine professionals from India to Singapore to Sweden use some term like it meant something, yet nobody agrees on what.)
Some use “aromatic” as merely an adjective to describe any wine that leaps up out of the glass and grabs you by the beard (I’ve been meaning to shave that thing), proclaiming its presence and lineage.
Yet not all that wafts from your glass is aroma. The word is supposed to refer only to smells that come from grapes. Nuances from winemaking, like toasty yeast, vanilla-coconut oak, or buttery malolactic fermentation, are known as bouquet. By that definition, a beefed up chardonnay might wave semaphores in your face, but it ain’t aromatic.
To others, “aromatic” includes any white wine with distinctive, characteristic aroma. Sauvignon Blanc, for instance, with its signature grapefruit and cat-pee notes.
But to me, the term is really only helpful when it's restricted to a very particular sort of grape. The kind characterized by rosy or orange blossom perfume so pretty you want to spray it on you pulse points. The smell of little bivalve-shaped guest soaps, or those bowls of potpourri that multiply in the night in the doily-strewn wastelands of B&Bs.
These litchi-peachy odors come from high concentrations of certain terpenes. Among the grapes that have them in plenty is the muscat family, one of the oldest domesticated grapes and the only one that tastes like the wine it makes. Other aromatic grapes include gewurztraminer, malvasia, muscadelle, kerner, riesling and viognier as well as torrontés in Argentina, verdejo in Rueda, fiano in Campania, albariño in Rias Baixas and a grape in Portugal that can't make up its mind whether to call itself fernao pires or maria gomes.
The perfume sets you up for sweet, though the wines are often fermented bone-dry. But they can also range from semi-sweet aperitives to syrupy late harvest dessert wines. They make particularly charming sparkling wine using a simple process that preserves the rosy fruit, in contrast to the aristocratic layers of yeast, fermentation and bottle age that result from the Champagne method.
While some grapes scream their identity and others change like chameleons to reflect native terroir, aromatic grapes do both. They also age beautifully, gaining bottle complexity—an evolved, mature bouquet—on top of their distinctive aroma. (Bouquet, aroma...remember?)
A delicious change for sipping, aromatic wines also go great with summer food. Asian and Indonesian dishes, spicy sausage and curry all go down smoothly with these wines. So stick a bottle in your fridge today, and while you’re in there, why not throw out the damned vermouth.
© Copyright 2006. All rights reserved.
