A Mouthful of Wine

Taste vs. Flavor

We tend to use the words taste and flavor interchangeably, but they are really two different concepts.

Taste is registered by your tongue, and current science knows of only five tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami (also called savory or brothy).

Flavor includes taste, plus texture (perceived by your tongue, gums, and the walls of your mouth) and smell—and some would argue that the influences of appearance, memory, culture, and preference play a part in flavor as well.

If you have ever had a sinus cold clog your sense of smell, you know how unappealing a taste-only diet can be. It is the sense of smell that adds so many more dimensions to food and wine. In a blind tasting, it would be the flavor (smell + texture + taste), not taste alone, that tells your brain “this is chicken” or “this is Cabernet.”

VieVinum and Vienna city wines

Beginning my recent trip to Austria with three days at VieVinum, the Austrian wine trade fair held every other year in Vienna, gave me the immersion course I needed before driving into the countryside to visit winemakers. I attended with a small group of wine professionals based (except myself) in California and connected in various ways to Blue Danube Wine Company.

The fair is held in a magnificent setting—a wing of the colossal imperial palace of the Habsburgs, called the Hofburg, in the center of Vienna. The Hofburg was the seat of the Habsburgs from the 13^th century until 1918, with new rooms and wings being added to the original medieval fortress over the centuries. Its 2,600 rooms now house the offices of the federal president, ministers and secretaries; the national library; museums and the imperial apartments, which can be seen by visitors; and much more. The rooms devoted to VieVinum were gilded and chandeliered, and occasionally one encountered an 18^th-century stove in the corner of an otherwise empty room.

The fair itself offered an opportunity to design one’s own Austrian wine education, whether by focusing on regionally themed rooms where hundreds of wine producers set up tables and poured their wines, or by tasting single grapes across many regions. Tasting 80 to 100 wines each day, asking questions of producers, talking to whoever stood at one’s elbows, exchanging cards—your typical trade fair.

There were also seminars and daytrips to attend, offered by the official organizers or by groups of producers. I started the fair Saturday morning with one of these: a breakfast tasting of Gemischter Satz. This is a type of fruity white wine that is grown in the vineyards that lie on the edges of the city of Vienna, within the city limits. The wine style is a “field blend” of at least three and up to twenty-plus different grape varieties grown together in the same vineyards and harvested and vinified all at the same time. Some are available in the U.S. (look for Wieninger, for starters), and with their uncomplicated style and spritzy freshness, they couldn’t be better suited to breakfast or brunch.   

Left: View of the fair. Above: Six-foot stoves are still found in some rooms.

If You Like Pinot Noir...

St. Laurent is one of those obscure grapes that makes a cameo appearance on the wine lists of restaurants that pride themselves on esoteric offerings (I last encountered it at Hearth, in Manhattan) or serve Austrian food. It is rare enough that it doesn’t register on the personal scale of known grapes until it can be tasted en masse—an opportunity that presented itself recently in Vienna. On the night before VieVinum, the big Austrian trade fair, was to begin, I was invited to a dinner at the old classic Vienna restaurant Zum Schwarzen Kameel (the Black Camel). The purpose was to present the St. Laurents of nine producers to an international group of journalists.

St. Laurent is grown almost exclusively in Austria, with small plantings in the Czech Republic and Germany. It is thought to have been brought to Austria from Alsace, but history’s sources are slim and inconclusive. Although plantings have increased by almost 100% in the past decade, there is still only a tiny amount produced by a dedicated few.

St. Laurent has been compared to Pinot Noir, which seems apt for a number of reasons. Perhaps most obvious is that Pinot is one of the parents of the St. Laurent variety; the second parent is unknown. St. Laurent seems to take a certain fussy difficulty from Pinot, although the former flowers early (at risk from late frosts) and the latter ripens late (at risk from early frosts). Both can be tricky in the winery. In the glass, most of the 17 examples I tasted were light in color like Pinot, high in acidity—making St. Laurent, too, a great food wine—and only medium in tannins. In spite of a few differences, it comes down to this: I can’t think of another grape that is as similar. Aromas in the younger wines included red cherries, a Pinot earthiness, rosehips, and intense floral aromas on a couple of examples (Schneider Estate’s 2007 Reserve and Pittnauer’s 2007 Rosenberg). The main difference from at least Old World Pinot seems to be a greater fresh fruit profile in the young St. Laurent, a slightly more generous impression.

Some of the bottles poured at the dinner, along with the Schwarzen Kameel.

If you like French or Italian Pinot Noir, try St. Laurent. The nine producers represented at the dinner were Juris, Rosi Schuster, Pittnauer, Umathum, Johanneshof Reinisch, Schneider Estate, Schloss Gobelsburg, Grassl, and Stift Klosterneuburg. St. Laurents from the first five of these can reliably be found in the U.S., and other good producers are available as well.