Sommelier André Mack Answers Wine Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

hey I'm Samuel Andre Houston Mack let's answer some questions from Twitter this is wine support [Music] agent brown eyes ask why do people swirl the wine glass around before they taste it you see a lot of people doing this I know it kind of looks pretentious but there's a reason why people do this basically what we're doing here is aerating the wine the wine has been in its vessel the bottle and it's been in there you know a year or two you want to open it up and you want to let the wine breathe we expose the wine to oxygen it starts to like break down the tannins in the wine and make the wine a little bit more softer and approachable at Wanderlust ask sparkling wine versus champagne what's the difference sparkling wine can be made from anywhere in the world so technically speaking champagne is sparkling wine Old World style wines are named after a place champagne is a place located in France and anything made in Champaign can be called champagne any sparkling wine Meats outside of the region of Champaign in France can be only be called sparkly one it's generally speaking when you're talking about a sparkling wine this is probably made with what we like to call the injection method so cot is injected into a still wine that it produces the bubbles in it and you're talking about Prosecco this is champagne how the bubbles get in the bottle or a little bit differently there's a secondary fermentation that happens inside the bottle use and sugar are added and the byproduct that is CO2 that's the gas and the bubbles that you get in it champagne can only be made through the secondary fermentation that happens in the bottle add bokeh then one ask what are the different types of wine grapes there's probably about 11 of them but the ones most commonly used in making wine is called vitis veronifera so you have the species and then from there you go into the grape varietals you most commonly know something like Chardonnay Riesling sauvignon blanc or whites right Reds Pinot Noir Cabernet Syrah so grapes that are used in making wine are very different than grapes that we consume you know in our homes or we have in the refrigerator the ones that we consume are really big juicy and those aren't really great for making wine with this particular species the grape varados we're talking about they're very smaller clusters tightly bound you know they have a little bit more impact on the wine that they're making because of the skin to pulp ratio so they're smaller that means there's more skin to the pulp that's in the inside of the grape those grapes are much better for making wine than say the larger and more juicier ones at cutie with crohn's asks wait what does dry wine mean how can it be dry if it's wet in wine terminology dry means that the wine is not sweet you know you hear people talk about tannins you hear people talk about body acid fruit and that's just like the fruitiness of the wine body is just you know how it sits on your palate if it's full body then it sits pretty heavy on your palate and it kind of has like a long you know a longer aftertaste light body wines tend to like you know kind of dance on the palate a little bit but not as long or lingering and if you're talking about tannin Oak imparts tannin from the wood so it's this drying feeling that you get in the insides of your cheek very much like you can experience that drinking like black tea right when we talk about wine that's aged for you know 10 20 30 years a lot of those wines have tannin tannin is the longevity at flight underscore wine underscore bar ask why store wine on its side and when you're storing wine over a long periods of time it's important to have the liquid inside the wine bottle be in contact with the court this keeps the court moist so it doesn't dry out over time and become brittle and allow oxygen to come in to the bottle and destroy it but if you store it like this you see that there's the Gap here but if you store it on its side now you see the cork is in full contact with the wine here at Gene wandimi ask how do you read wine labels When shopping slash ordering we talk about old war wines which are generally from Europe and then when we talk about New World Wines which is North America South America and Australia so old war wines are generally named after the place that they're grown sanser is sauvignon blanc from the sansea region of France it doesn't say sauvignon blanc anywhere on this bottle new world wines are generally lead for it with what's actually in the bottle they lead with the grape varietal so this here it says Cabernet Sauvignon then it talks about where it's from from Napa and what's interesting in California you only have to have 75 percent to actually put the grape on the label each region has its own governing body that lays out the rules for what can be happening in said wine region this bottle wine contains at least 75 percent of Cabernet Sauvignon legally you can add different grape varietals you know to complete the 100 blend atmo 163 underscore asks are we ever going to discuss how wax Chardonnay is as a wine and that it is the most inferior from white wines some of the most prized white wines in the world happen to be Chardonnay it's all about your taste you're an expert in your own taste me as a Samuel I'm just a tour guide right and I think there's been the blowback over the years it was a movement called ABC anything but Chardonnay and I think that really pertained to you know kind of the new world styles of Chardonnay you know adulterate it with you know wood so they come off very vanilla cinnamon very toasty and slightly kind of ripe so a little bit of sweetness in them so if you think about you know mantrache which is a very small Vineyard located in burgundy in France those wines sell for thousands of dollars and probably some of the most sought after and rare Wines in the world so it's just a matter of taste and opinion I do like Chardonnay up next at Ophelia Museum is ask there are so many different types of wine glasses who decided which ones correspond to the wine type and how there's lots of different glasses right for different types of wine that you're going to enjoy and I have a few here to kind of show you traditionally speaking when you look at a flute this is something festive it's trying to capture the bubbles showcase the bubbles here what we call the Moose you know this is a hybrid right so the idea is kind of sleek almost like a flute another fun way to be able to enjoy sparkling wine so this is your white wine glass the idea behind the white wine is it's going to be a smaller glass right you don't need as much air to surface ratio and it's going to be a little bit more tapered in you want to kind of be able to capture the aroma so a white wine glass tends to be a little bit smaller than a red wine when you think about a red wine glass it kind of acts as a mini decanter that gives you a little bit more surface to air ratio you can swirl the glass and then be able to enjoy it Port is what you considered a fortified wine it's wine that's being made and then you add alcohol to it to fortify the wine it is served in a smaller squatter glass smaller glass because most people wouldn't consume a full glass of this generally can be up to like 17 19 alcohol at West Van Court ask can you send a bottle of wine back after you already started to drink it ideally you're in a restaurant setting you can always send it back right whether or not they take it off their check is something different when you actually taste the wine you're tasting the wine to see if it's sound not if it's good generally people send a bottle of wine back you know if it's defective right you know if it's turned to vinegar or what you generally see you know why affected by cork tank cork tank if affects you know one bottle and a 12 bottle case generally people don't send back a bottle of wine because it doesn't taste to their liking at Mayana asks why are wine labels slash descriptions so pretentious and what does a wine being approachable mean I'm not trying to date it so you hear something like approachable balance like well when a wine is balanced means that like if the wine is overly fruity right then that wine is out of balance if the wine is too acidic that wine is out of balance the idea of wine and when it's drinking great and it's at its peak is when all of those things are seamless a wine being approachable meaning that wine takes a long time for it to be ready to drink when you say approachable wine it just means that it's very easy to drink and not as complicated I actually don't use any type of wine descriptions I use emojis at arsenic 14 ask why does the wine bottle have to have a Cork Wine which is steep in Tradition we still continue to use cork you know it's barked from a tree mainly in Portugal so you know that's limited resources so what you start to see is synthetic corks composite corks glass Stoppers and you also see you know the screw cap does a screw cap actually mean the bottle of wine is cheap and I would say no and yes this is the way I like to think about it screw cap wines are generally wines that are meant to be drank younger and consumed younger a screw cap is all about twisting the top off and getting the party started I think for people who are making premium wines and wines that traditionally age over time cork is the preferred method at ozxx ask WTF is organic wine question mark question mark upside down question mark upside down question mark organic is the is the way in which the grapes are being grown not using any pesticides you can go one step further with the use of biodynamic who's created back in like I think 1912 by an Austrian doctor you know it follows the cycles of the moon right but I think it's more a conscious effort uh to taking care of the planet overall it's bigger than just if it tastes better right I think that the practices and the things that you do kind of really help preserve the earth and the longevity of our time here next question at this is Mayor ask so how does one turn grape juice into wine like how does the whole fermentation and process work hashtag series question so this process is fairly simple it could be complicated in some ways you know it's a different process for white and red but overall the process is grapes come in they're harvested they are crushed and some places they do what they call foot treading where you're actually stomping the grape with your feet a lot of times it's just put in a vessel and then the weight from The Grapes of the top actually Crush their weights on the bottom and then you're doing what's called punch down as the grapes are like being crushed the skins and the pits and all that kind of rise to the top right and create a cap right and what you want to do is kind of keep immersing the cap down into the wine so I can pick up color and all the nuances that the grapes have to start fermentation yeast is added so yeasts are these little cells that are introduced and they actually eat up all the sugars and what's kind of different is then they expel alcohol and then after that it's bottled right there's a few steps in between bottling filtration clarifying the wine and then it goes into bottles at baronhawk asks what do you mean gulping isn't the proper way to taste red wine so gulping uh insinuates that you're not really even tasting wine you in order to appreciate it I like to think that like you shouldn't gulp it but to each his own we poured wine generally speaking for a taste you just want to pour it to the widest part in the glass I'm going to go ahead and Swirl It generally I like to swirl it before so I'm aerating it let it open up I put my nose like right here in the glass so I inhale through my nose and exhale through my mouth eighty percent of taste is actually through smell so I'm really opening up my olfactory senses you heard that noise I'm kind of swishing the wine in my mouth this is all just aerating just bringing air over the wine that kind of helps with you know the taste normally what I do is push the wine through the front part of my teeth that you know affects my gums in a certain way and that tells me something about the wine if the sides of my tongue start to tingle that means the wine is high in acid there's not a drying out of the inside of my mouth so this wine tends to have low tannin so I'm trying to confirm the things that I smelled on the nose on the palate so there's raspberry I do taste a tin of strawberry a hint of cranberry there's a minerality in the wine you know good acid and then when you swallow you're generally trying to see how long you can taste it afterwards and that's what they call the Finish at quickvit asks is it only my wife who thinks the wine fridge is necessary if you get to a point that you like a wine fridge there is a purpose to them they keep the wine at a steady temperature is what you need you want it at the correct temperature but you also want it to be steady no vast kind of changes in temperature so if you pulled a white wine out of a wine fridge that's normally at 55 degrees you probably want to put it in the refrigerator for a few minutes you probably want to put it on ice red wine served too warm just really accentuates the alcohol so you get more of that burning sensation in your mouth of alcohol you want to serve your red wines around 65 to 72 degrees something like that at Marco Mariani underscore it asks how does soil influence wine quality the French they talk about terroir it's a sense of place right it is Mother Nature but it's also the soil right you know you look at something like classic like Chablis which is chardonnay from France from the region of Chablis and that's actually grown on like a limestone really kind of chalky soil that really kind of is the Hallmark and signature when you're drinking Chablis right it's that chalkiness to the flintiness that you get and that's in part in the wine some of the best soil to use is a loamy soil right it's very kind of crumbly and porous the idea when you think about a grapevine is that it's Roots its roots need to kind of struggle and that produces some of the kind of the best fruit and the only way to do that is the roots to kind of dig deeper for water when you look at your grape clusters you want them to be slightly tight but you want them to have shoulders that perfect fruit in the way that it's grown has a lot to do with the soil at dirty wine glass ask hey why on Twitter question for you how do you decide whether or not to decant a wine what do you use as your guideline vintage varietal producer let's go ahead and decant so you have a bottle of wine here and this is a decanter you would decant a young wine a youthful wine to let it aerate and to breathe the second reason you would decant is an older wine when you can an older wine what you're doing is removing the sediment from the bottle and that allows you to have a better drinking experience so to speak and now you wanted to Camp so we're just going to take the bottle we're going to rest into my thumb and then we're going to start to pour I think with more younger wines you could probably be a little bit more aggressive important in the bottle put older Vintage Wines you want to go like slow and steady you want to stop right when the sediment is trapped in the neck at unoi 918 ask do I really have to have a degree to be a samoye what if I just have good taste and like to tell people what to drink assembly is really in charge of anything liquid within the restaurant in order to be a samoye that's really a title that's anointed to you by a restaurant although you get hired to be a samoye there are organizations that you can kind of go through the ranks and reach some of the highest titles one being Master samoye another one being a master of wine so I think the master Samuel a exam takes a minimum of five years to pass I got into wine by watching old episodes of Frasier and from there I caught what we like to call the wine bug at six does ask are you supposed to have white wine with fish the general consensus is white wine with fish red wine with meat but these are some of the old guidelines that still exist within the industry most of the local wine makers and towns and people that made wine they made wine that went with the local food so a lot of times when I'm looking at parents I start regionally I look at where is this dish traditionally from what are the ingredients with it and what did the locals drink with it the idea of wine is to help reset your palate back to zero you can do it with a contrast method so that's like having you know a pasta dish with a very creamy sauce and you know using a buttery Rich kind of Chardonnay so you're matching like with light another way to do it is to take that same creamy dish and you want to do a contrast you're going to do something a little bit more higher in acid and lean to help cut through the richness of the sauce lots of different ways to kind of combat it and look at it and it's more of like taste than it is a science at Jeff Bolton asks what is a cool climate wine region how does this impact the taste and the quality of the wines so I guess the easiest way to kind of break this down is think about hot and cold everything about cold regions cooler regions we can talk about like champagne in Europe you know the idea that like it actually snows in Champaign the difficulty with growing grapes in a cold region is that you can't really get the grapes to ripen so ripe grapes means that they have sugar so if they have sugar in them this is how you start the fermentation process by adding yeast cooler climates kind of suffer but in those years that you can actually get the grapes to ripen enough cooler climates are the best you get lower alcohol you get more Nuance in the wine and you get kind of these great acidity you know acid is an amplifier right the reason why you put salt on food limit on Seafood is really to kind of crank up the flavors of the dish and if you look at hot weather it's kind of the opposite right you don't want the grapes to get sunburned right the idea of having too much sugar in a wine can affect the wine also so wines that tend to have more alcohol tend to come from warmer regions right and sit really heavy on your palate at the meat Shack ask why does rose wine exist Rose is a category of wine much like white wine and red wine and within that there's many different grapes that can be used white wine grapes to make white so to speak and red wine grapes to make red rose is made from red grapes with a slight skin contact that gives it this pill kind of color a lot of red wine bleeds clear juice how it picks up its color is the contact to the Skins the longer that it's on the Skins the longer maceration process and you get deeper color and Rose it's just a slight contact with the skins that produced us a little bit of kind of pale color that you see here add Robin brousseau ask what else is in this wine besides grapes hashtag stupid questions for some ways sugar can be added to Wine right it's called capitalization so it's illegal in several countries in several regions like you know think about burgundy in particular sulfur is a byproduct of fermentation so almost every single wine has sulfur in it people use sulfur to sprinkle on grapes and like sometimes you can overdo that and I believe it's somehow it's been linked to actually people getting headaches from sulfur you know byproduct of fermentation is histamines and I think that's generally what people are allergic to there's actually more sulfur in a slice of bread than there is in a bottle of wine but generally speaking what you have in the wine is about 95 water so those are all the questions for today that was really fun and interesting I could do that forever but I just wanted to say thank you so much for watching wine support

Channel: WIRED

Views: 451,160

Keywords: andre mack wine, andre mack wine sommelier, andre mack wired, andré hueston mack, answering wine questions, expert in wine, innovation, ott tech support, science & technology, sommelier, sommelier andre mack, wine expert, wine questions, wired, wired andre mack

Id: HM6Rak_d-5s

Length: 17min 5sec (1025 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 25 2023