As Your Tastes Become More Refined

I've noticed it pretty broadly in wine drinkers. When people first start enjoying wine, they tend to like over the top wines whether they be big, bold, very high alcohol content Cabernet or really, really buttery Chardonnay to give a couple of examples. But, when their palates become more refined, their tastes tend to change.

In particular, I saw this last night. I was around three people who have tasted a fair amount of wine in their lives. They were talking about white wines and each mentioned four styles in particular -- Sancerre, the eponymous French Sauvignon Blanc from the town that sits on a limestone-based hilltop near the geographic center of the country, Albarino, the grape indigenous to the Rias Baixas ragion of Spain, Riesling, the grape grown mostly in cooler growing regions around the world, and Gruner Veltliner, another cool weather grape known for its complexity in well-aged wines particularly from Wachau, Austria.

What do all these wines have in common? None are overpowering, in fact their flavors are often a bit subtle. All can be quite minerally, particularly when young. All have good acidity. And, all are quite food friendly.

Before the world, or at least the US, got more health conscious when seemingly more people than not ate lots and lots of red meat, finding wines that were friendly with those foods was easy. Jut grab something big and bold and fruit forward with lots of tannins.

But, our diets, as a population have changed. To me, at least, they seem to have gravitated much more toward vegetable and salads and those present different wine challenges. Often, we need a wine that goes with a salad of some sort, but with a protein added and sometimes that protein, at least from a wine standpoint, has little to do with the rest of the salad.

And, this is why more experienced wine drinkers seem to be moving more and more to really food-friendly wines. They look for acidity rather than body. They look for subtleties rather than power.

It seems to be the way of a refined palate.