Help me understand primary, secondary, tertiary characteristics

WINE TALK
41

From some of these definitions, primary would be un-fermented grape juice. I think the closest you can get to a primary wine is right from the press, pre-malo, pre-barrel. Usually delicious.

42

Easy:

Primary - all the characteristics coming from the vineyard and grape (fruit, floral, herbaceous)

Secondary - all the characteristics coming from the wine making process (oak, malo, lees contact, etc)

Tertiary- the feeling you get looking at your bank account after buying an aged wine that properly exhibits this level of characteristics

43

_In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

  • J. Alfred Prufrock_

I might be in “chasing my tail” mode right now , but here is my latest scenario (again based on ready availability to me where I am as well as inputs from here)
Sociando: 2014 vs 2004
OR
Potensac: 2016 vs 2008

. . . maybe BOTH?

44

Sorry, Chris, rereading my first post, it looks like I called you out, which wasn’t my intention at all. I just believe that there is a standard definition, and that we should all try to use it. It really isn’t a matter of opinion.

I know what people mean when they say, “with time this wine develops secondary characteristics,” and I am not pedantic enough to correct them, but that doesn’t make the language correct, it just makes me less of an asshole.*

*Dammit, I typed out the whole word!

45

Agreed. The “wine making flavors” definition of secondary is completely different from certainly how I have used it but also how many others use it in tasting notes and the like, to mean basically how a wine mellows and adds complexity in its initial stage of aging.

46

Dude. This is Wine Berserkers.

The correct answer is always the greater quantity.

Duh.

PS. I liked 2014 Potensac. 2000 quite nice as well.

47

And many others do not use it in that way, but instead how it is actually defined and taught in many places. One can always choose to use the term correctly or incorrectly. [wink.gif]

48

Jim - I’d go older. I have less experience with Bordeaux than I do with say, Rioja, but you get more serious differences at say, 25 years on. Or you can try Gamay, which seems to evolve much more quickly than some grapes.

With a younger red wine, just bottled, you’ll generally get a lot of fruity notes. One reason people do carbonic maceration for wines intended for young drinking is because those fruity notes are amplified. And as John says, there’s nothing at all wrong with that. No negative connotations here anyway.

Using Peynaud’s definition, which may or may not correlate to the WSET stuff - I really don’t know as I haven’t bothered to look at it, the fermentation process produces some of its own aromas and flavors. So you asked about Chablis. You can make an argument that the notes of bread and nuts are secondary as they come from the yeast and fermentation, whereas the notes of pear and apple come from the berries.

Same with red wines. Tempranillo and Syrah for example, depending on where from, can often have notes of plums and cherries. And maybe even bacon/meat.

Then you put those away for twenty or thirty years. What do you get when you open those now mature wines? You get things that weren’t around in the original wine put into the bottles. Notes of dried strawberries, mushrooms, black tea, and leather. With a Bordeaux you might get notes of tobacco and leather. The tannins will likely have smoothed out and you won’t get the astringency of the young wine (although see the Agharta thread). Oak can sometimes recede a but who knows, you may still get notes of coconut, dill, Christmas spices, etc.

For an experiment, I’d go into the 90s for Bordeaux, and compare say 1996 with 2016, or if you can, go to 89 or 90 . You can do something similar with Brunello, Barolo, Rioja, Burgundy, etc. You’ll see that they all start out very different and they age differently, but oddly enough, they can also become more similar with age, which is kind of interesting.

And don’t overlook Gamay. It’s a great way to pick up those differences because its aging curve is a little quicker than others.

Some grapes take a long time to hit their peak and then they have a plateau and a decline. Some hit the plateau more quickly. Some have a very gentle decline, some more rapid.

Good luck!

49

But it’s harder to find gamay with more than a couple of years age, and a lot of them don’t get that much more complex, so that’s not where I’d start.

50

There’s no need to choose. You can enjoy both. And for the purposes of this exercise, it certainly doesn’t matter. It’s a category that shows evolution without waiting an absolute eternity (e.g., first-growth Bordeaux, top Burgundy, Barolo).

51

You could also go “cheap” and buy 4-5 bottles of Bordeaux from a lesser-prestige estate that’s known for aging well (like Lanessan, for one) - think 2-4 bottles from the 90s & 2000s and one from a recent vintage.

52

Well, I think it’s like “dry” and “sweet”, in that there are formal definitions so widely accepted that they are actually the correct definitions, despite the fact that many people use the terms incorrectly.

53

Doug,
I’m thinking back to that PG Etzel vertical that Kirk put together and what a wonderful opportunity that was to explore exactly what I am asking about now. Jim even arranged the wines into groupings of vintages that had similar conditions (not counting the “odd-balls”) to make it easy for us. Probably some of you were doing exactly that to my blissful ignorance. I was like the townfolk at Babette’s feast, while some of you were like the General. Nevetheless, a good and special time was still had by even the “townfolks”.
Cheers,
-Jim

54

Both, on separate days.

55

Very classy and kind of you to say that, Brady, even though (or maybe because) it wasn’t necessary.

This is kind of a weird discussion, though, where the definition seems to differ substantially from the way people actually use those terms. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone say “the wine is developing its secondary characteristics now 15 years from the vintage” and meant that the wine is now starting to show oak and other human intervention traits.

This does happen pretty often in the English language, though. The common usage of words can migrate over time away from the original meaning, and the pedant - I am one, myself - struggles with whether it’s better to resist or to go along. For example, I still hold to many words as being nouns rather than verbs (gift, disrespect, solution, etc.), but that tide is going heavily against me.

In this case, I had never heard the textbook definition and only knew the common usage, so I guess I didn’t end up pedanting [barf.gif] this thread like I might have otherwise done.

56

While I agree that the definitions provided here are the generally accepted ones, I also agree with the other folks who find them confusing. One significant reason is that the line between what is from the grape and what is from the fermentation is quite unclear, with even many “primary” fruit components being products of fermentation. The science here is also changing fast (and finding more and more comes from fermentation).

57

Secondary is a stage of development; the distinction based on characteristics from the “winemaking” is just silly. That’s WSET for you though; a parade of simplistic nonsense tasked at dumbing down the wonderful world of wine - breaking it into bite-sized chunks for immediate cognitive consumption.

58

[scratch.gif]

There is a clearly defined definition which you were unaware of and that makes you angry. Strange beyond belief.

59

I wondered this meself as well.

60

Yes, very odd.