Exam Tip - Swiss Army Knife Concepts - Blending
When you are preparing for wine exams—particularly those with an essay component—you really don’t know what to expect. Examiners can throw anything at you from the textbook and syllabus—any grape, region, wine style and more are all fair game. And if you’re studying for an exam that basically uses the Oxford Companion to Wine as the textbook? Ooooh boy!
Deep Breath!
Photo by Denise Jans @dmjdenise courtesy of Unplash
In many ways, studying for wine exams is like going on a hike out in the mountains. First, you plot your course (study plan!), studying the map, weather forecast and terrain (the text and study notes). Then you may also look up details and seek advice from folks who have hiked that path before. But even with all that prep, you still don’t quite know what the elements are going to throw at you.
So on the day of the hike, you want to make sure you pack well with food, water, proper gear & clothing, but also pack smart with handy tools that could help you in a variety of ways. And few tools are handier than the tried and trusty Swiss Army knife.
For wine exams, your “Swiss Army knife” are the concepts and details that you could use in a variety of ways across many different questions.
They’re the items that make up the carbon skeletons behind every wine. Abundantly present but often overlooked in favor of the flashier elements (Grape varieties! Soils! Vine training! Oak! Malo! Whole cluster! Yeast!) that fill up our flashcards. But these tools influence just as much the resulting style, price and quality of the wine. This is why understanding them (and knowing how to include them in your answer) is like having a Swiss Army knife in your back pocket on exam day.
This is the first of a series of posts we’ll do introducing these different Swiss Army knife attachments. But we’re going to start with a big one that applies to virtually every single wine imaginable.
Blending
Yes, virtually every single wine in the world is a blend in some way or fashion. Seriously! So that means there is a huge number of exam questions out there—asking about almost any wine—where you can likely get marks for including some of the HOWs and WHYs of blending in your answer.
Think about the many different ways that a wine can be a blend.
Blend of grapes, of course, but also…
Clones
Viticulture treatment (trellising, canopy management, irrigation/dry farm, yields, viticulture system, etc)
Vine age (young vines/old vines, etc)
Ripeness level (think about Sauternes which are blends from many different harvest tries and levels of botrytized-infected grapes)
Blend of terroir
Regions
Vineyards
Blocks within vineyards
Blend of winemaking treatments
Press fractions
Yeast selection
Fermentation temperatures/vessels/method (semi-carbonic?)
De-stem? Whole cluster?
Acidified? Deacidified?
Skin contact? Maceration method (pump over, punch downs, etc) and length (think about color impact with rosés)
MLF or not? (think about Chardonnay)
Lees aging or not? Different lengths of time
Bâtonnage or not? Different frequency and duration
Oak? New, neutral, what kind and how long?
Fining? Filtering?
And that’s not even an exhaustive list. But it should make clear that even a 100% single variety, single vineyard wine can be a blend in some way. Nearly every winemaking decision, every block, every tank, every barrel creates a pyramid of different blending components that winemakers put together as a finished product.
Grasping this idea and being able to explain how these many different blending components emerge and come together throughout the wine growing and winemaking process is a powerful tool to have in your wine exam arsenal. Whatever the wine, whatever the style or region that the examiners throw at you, step back, take a deep breath and think “How is blending happening here?”
But, remember, your HOWs are only as good as your WHYs
For advanced-level wine exams, the examiners usually want you to go beyond just a brain dump of facts. They want to see evidence of lateral thinking with students connecting the dots to explain why something is happening or what impact it has on the resulting style, price and quality of the wine in the glass.
This is why at Elevage Wine Coaching, we recommend students pace their exam answers with a 1-2 punch approach.
If you state a fact, follow with the impact.
If you start with the effect, follow with what it reflects.
In both cases, you’re linking a HOW (or WHAT) with the WHY (reason or impact) behind it. With blending, you can use this memory device below for the WHY and then finish your answer with how that impacts the particular style, price and quality of the wine you are being asked about.
For the most part, there are 7 main reasons for blending but I threw the “Rosé” in there to complete the memory device, not only because of how important blending is for sparkling rosés but, even with still rosés, the amount and many different types of blending they see (for color, balance, to meet volume demands & price points, etc.) are often overlooked.
And the wording of the memory device is quite deliberate because everything (style, price, quality) ultimately traces back to the consumer (another Swiss Army knife concept we’ll explore later).
Now go back and look at our list above of the many different ways that a wine can be a blend. Think about which of these eight WHYs for blending are most influenced by each decision. Many times there are multiple reasons that overlap. This is stuff to seed your answer with when you’re asked about a wine on an exam.
To wrap up - the world of wine is vast, but it’s also very connected.
You’ll notice a theme emerging with our future Swiss Army knife posts. Many times the answer you would write on a question about one wine will share a lot of similarities to the answer that you would write about another wine, made from different grapes, half a world away. Realizing that helps shake some of the daunting feelings you may have while trying to study and remember everything.
Yes, you don’t know what the examiners or elements are going to throw in your path. But if you put in the prep work and carry the right tools in your pocket, you’ll make it through just fine.