I read a review of the 2005 Colgin IX Syrah by Tanzer with the following quote: “Reticent, wild aromas of black fruits and licorice, with a distinct element of torrefaction” What the heck is torrefaction?
That description seems to be more like simply burning stuff. Torrefaction is what happens at high temperatures when things start to dry out and blacken, but involves no fire or smoke. A “forest fire burning through a blackberry patch” involves a lot of fire, smoke and char in my mind.
I’ve understood torrefaction simply implying roasted coffee tones, since that’s the sort of torrefaction people can relate to in everyday life. Most people associate the word immediately with coffee, since coffee roastery is “torrefazione” in Italian and used in many parts of the world and “torrefacto” is a style of coffee popular in Spain.
I had a 2007 Usseglio Mon Aieul last month. It definitely wasn’t hypergolic…unless you think any chateauneuf tastes like rocket fuel because it has more than 12.1% alcohol. I was surprised at how typical it tasted.
Your palate is all that matters. You will find very mixed reviews here on that wine and the base Domaine. The base Domaine is undrinkable to me, at least the MA has some density of fruit to it, but yea, it’s high alcohol and raisins to me. Not at all typical, and nor is the vintage. IMHO. The vintage is atypical, but sadly, has become the benchmark for future vintages. I’m almost entirely out of the CDP market at this point.
Torrefazione is certainly an expression I see associated with Italian coffee roasters. The term might be more generally about roasting (but not roasting meats which has other expressions). I’ve never dug deeper.
I think you can credit / blame Michael Schuster for this, as it was the word he used when he translated Peynaud’s “The Taste of Wine”. It means roasted, yes in the sense of coffee beans, but in this context in the sense of roasted, toasted aromas in wine. While roasted, toasted aromas can come from oak barrels, that is not their only source by any means, they can come from the fruit themselves. For obvious reasons, “The Taste of Wine” was quite influential on the vocabulary that Tanzer, Parker and others used in their tasting notes. I think the translation was first published in 1980.
OK if people want the boring stuff - torrefaction is used for a lot of things.
You take some organic material, heat it to drive off most of the stuff except for the carbon, and then you can smash it into pellets, bricks, or whatever. Henry Ford was one of the first to do this commercially. Even though you’re putting energy into the product with heat and then the mechanical processes, it’s still a net positive value because you don’t have to worry about rot or any microbe decomposition, it’s lighter than the original material since the water is driven out, and it burns more cleanly. There’s a lot of interest in this in both the agriculture industry and also the rail industry, even though electrification is really the way things are going with the latter. But you still need to generate that electricity and people don’t like coal fired plants. There are even microwave torrefaction plants.
But I’m standing by my definition. I don’t know how many fuel producers Tanzer has visited, but from a literary viewpoint, you don’t really want to associate wine with a manufacturing plant. It doesn’t really work as evocative
imagery.