[MUSIC] Welcome back, in the previous session we discussed wine clarity. In this lesson, we will look at wine color. So what about color? Color is a little more difficult. I always tell my students that the first rule of color evaluation is notice it but please don't jump to conclusions. Color can be very, very tricky. And we all have an incredible, incredibly different, well, slightly different at least, color vision. And that's been shown time and time again. Generally speaking, white wines can range from very, very pale straw or yellow to medium straw, to a little bit darker straw, maybe with some light gold creeping in. And then more and more gold. And then hints of amber or brown as the wine gets older and older. So, again, to run through that. Watery or stripped-looking to very pale straw, pale straw, pale straw plus, medium straw, medium straw minus and medium straw plus can certainly be used. Medium straw, touch of gold. Medium straw, touch of gold, slight amber. And so on. Interestingly enough, we can make a general statement about white wine color, that white wines tend to darken as they age. They may start out darker, but however they start out, they will darken with age. Red wines, on the other hand, lighten with age. Red wines tend to lose color with age. As a third part to that general rule, both red wines and white wines tend to gravitate towards amber, or brown, or adobe type colors when they age. I actually remember one instance where we were tasting very old white and burgundy's, so that would be very old chardonnay made in Burgundy. Very old Pinot noir made in Burgundy. Very old meaning 25 to 30 years old. And had we not had the bottles in front of us, we would have not known which one had been the white wine, which one had been the red wine. The white wine had picked up a lot of color. The red wine had dropped a lot of color. And they both had turned amber. So we really couldn't tell. Needless to say, those wines were actually quite over aged and over the hill. So in terms of red wine color, we can sometimes tell a little bit more about the wine. But again, we hesitate to jump to conclusions because red wine color is tricky. Red wines exhibit, most often, colors that result from the particular red grape from which they were made. Red wine fermentations, as you know, are done with the skins and the pulp in the tank while the wine is fermenting. So the color that they pick up is specific to the skins of whatever grape we're using for the fermentation. Some grapes have very strikingly individual color signatures if they've been made well, and if they have not been blended with any other variety, and if they have not been subject to a lot of age. It's up to us to learn what those signature colors are. Later on, when we go through the flavor signatures of the top eight white varieties made into wine and the top eight red varieties, I'll make specific comments about the colors that we can expect. But just briefly for now, the colors range from garnet or a garnet ruby, for a Pinot Noir, to a ruby red, light or dark ruby red for Merlot, to a purplish ruby red for Cabernet. To a purple purplish-red for Zinfandel. To a very purplish purple for a variety such as Syrah, particularly Syrah grown in a cooler climate. So if any of those particular varieties are blended with any other varieties, that can alter the color that you actually see. I walked into a famous California central coast tasting room a while back and was offered a glass of their new release Pinot Noir to taste. And it was very purple. And I said, aah! What's this? And they said, well it's our new release Pinot Noir. And I said, really? That's an astounding color for this Pinot Noir. Of course, I was very respectful. And they said, well, yes, this is due to our new one two three xyz clone from Dijon, and so I said nothing. And I enjoyed the wine. It was terrific wine, but the color was completely wrong and inappropriate, and nontraditional for Pinot Noir, so of course they blended something in. Did that ruin the flavor of the pinot noir? No, not really. Did that ruin all the taste, and aftertaste, and finish of the pinot noir? Not at all. But right up front, in my mind, had I been any other taster walking in the door, my impression would have been completely thrown off by the color that that wine presented. There's something else that we can notice with red wine color as we tip the glass. Again, let me make up just a brief comment on the size of glass that we might want to use and the size of the amount of wine that we might want to pour into that glass. Let's say we have a six or seven ounce wine glass, and let's say that we've poured about an ounce into it. So we're going to take this glass, and proper wine glasses have stems, by the way. Since they have stems, I can hold it by the stem and tilt the bowl of the glass away from me against that lovely copier paper, white background with a good light source. And by tipping the glass at a 45 degree angle, I can spread that red color out so that I have a thin rim of color to look at, and I have a deeper core of color to look at. Red wines are difficult to see through many times. If there's some haze in that wine, it can make that color look darker than it really is. So it's important to spread that liquid out and have some light bouncing through that wine. So as the light bounces through the wine, I want to notice the hue of the wine, the particular color of the wine. Does it stay the same from the darker color that I see in the deeper core of the liquid to the thinner liquid that I see around the rim? Is that color the same throughout? If it is, that's an indication that the wine color is at a stable point in its life, that the wine if probably fairly young, maybe just a couple of years old, or maybe up to four or five years old. If I see a little bit of a brown color as I look through that thin, shallow rim of wine, versus a darker more ruby red, for example, color that I see looking through the core of that wine. That variation between the rim and the core, which we call rim variation, is an indication that the wine might be a little bit older. Maybe four or five to seven or eight years old. If I see a little bit wider variation, maybe some brown around the rim and sort of a dark non descript ruby red through in the core, the wine might be at older, 10 or 15 years old. Be very careful though, I recently have a wine poured for me that had quite a brown rim, and kind of an indistinct, dark purplish-red core. And my eye told me that it was ten years old. And my nose and my palate told me that it was freshly bottled. And then I came to find that that wine had been aged for two years in brand new oak. And so that brown color came from oak rather than from age. So we have to be very, very, very, very careful in jumping to conclusions when we see the color clues. The best thing to do is to write our notes on color and move on, file them away and move on to our next stage of evaluation, which is using our sense of smell. If we see any sediment in that wine when we're judging clarity, it's not necessarily anything to worry about. We can easily sip a wine without getting sediment in our mouth. It's inconsequential. If we see bubbles in that glass, we might want to make a note this wine has slight CO2. I'll just sometimes write CO2 or bubbles in my little note sheet and sort of reserve judgement. I may or may not taste those bubbles when I put that wine in my mouth. The bubbles may be very, very slight. They may be transient. An interesting way to see if a white wine has bubbles, you can't do this a red. But with a white wine, you can actually hold a glass up in the air and look at the surface from underneath. It's easier to see floating bubbles from underneath when you have a good light source than it is sort of looking down on the wine. Looking down on the wine, you may not see them or you may think that they are actually sediment. But you can definitely see floating bubbles looking underneath at the surface of a wine. In this lesson, we looked at wine color. In our next lesson, we will turn our attention to that first sniff.
