I completely agree that some wines smell and/or taste of what I would call minerality. A rock has no smell, but river water evaporating off of that rock can. Also, the dust coming up when gravel is being poured has a very distinct smell, as does dew evaporating off of that gravel or one of many other types of stone. Flint produces a very distinctive odor when struck.
I think a lot of the backlash comes from so many people in the business, and even certain educational “authorities”, still perpetuating the myth that any of this comes directly from the mineral content in the ground. Some people here would be surprised at how many times I hear otherwise extremely educated wine students/professionals still saying things like that.
Your post got me curious about the nature of that flint smell, so I went to Google. Mainly I got hits about toxins in the water of Flint, Michigan. But I also turned up this gem from the Dr. Vinny column on the Wine Spectator site, which leads one around in a circle of seemingly meaningless equivalents:
Dear Dr. Vinny,
What does “flint” or “gun flint” indicate in a tasting note?
—Pablo Diaz, Santo Domingo
Dear Pablo,
Both of these terms are used to describe a mineral note that is often found in dry, austere white wines such as Chablis or Sauvignon Blanc. If you know what flint striking steel smells like, that’s it. Another way to think of it is as a wet metal or “steely” aroma. If none of that is ringing a bell, think of a clean earthy, minerally note, like the smell of wet pebbles.
—Dr. Vinny
So “flint” = “mineral” (which we haven’t been able to define) = “wet metal” or “steely” (which seem like they should be inert and odor-free) = “wet pebbles” (and we seem to agree that rocks have no smell unless, possibly, there is evaporation).
A quote from Hugh Johnson’s article about the evolution of the tasting note in The World of Fine Wine 2014:
"We can discern many stylistic shifts in recent years. The first was an invasion of similes to supplement a limited supply of adjectives. Wines are no longer merely delicate or fine, but “like” lemons or nettles, or indeed boysenberries or loganberries. They go further than merely resembling fruits; they “offer” them, in confusing but perfectly categorical medleys – most categorically of all on the laminated wine cards of bars with peremptory lists of the usual suspects, each expressing to perfection the stoniness, the nettles, or tropical fruit customarily attributed to its grape or region.
And above all, the minerality. Who launched this elusive (but now apparently universal) quality and descriptor? Such a thing certainly exists in wine, but nine times out of ten the writer simply means acidity, and might have said so. The cunning of “minerality,” as used for sales purposes, is in its undertone of terroir, the hint that roots and stones are somehow implicated."
Petrichor (/ˈpɛtrᵻkɔər/) is the earthy scent produced when rain falls on dry soil. The word is constructed from Greek petra, meaning “stone”, and ichor, the fluid that flows in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology.
The term was coined in 1964 by two Australian CSIRO researchers, Isabel Joy Bear and Richard G. Thomas, for an article in the journal Nature.[1][2] In the article, the authors describe how the smell derives from an oil exuded by certain plants during dry periods, whereupon it is absorbed by clay-based soils and rocks. During rain, the oil is released into the air along with another compound, geosmin, a metabolic by-product of certain actinobacteria, which is emitted by wet soil, producing the distinctive scent; ozone may also be present if there is lightning.[3] In a follow-up paper, Bear and Thomas (1965) showed that the oil retards seed germination and early plant growth.[4] This would indicate that the plants exude the oil in order to safeguard the seeds from germination under duress.
In 2015, MIT scientists used high-speed cameras to record how the scent moves into the air.[5] The tests involved approximately 600 experiments on 28 different surfaces, including engineered materials and soil samples.[6] When a raindrop lands on a porous surface, air from the pores forms small bubbles, which float to the surface and release aerosols.[5] Such aerosols carry the scent, as well as bacteria and viruses from the soil.[5] Raindrops that move at a slower rate tend to produce more aerosols; this serves as an explanation for why the petrichor is more common after light rains.[5]
Some scientists believe that humans appreciate the rain scent because ancestors may have relied on rainy weather for survival.[7]
The biggest thing to remember is that wine TNs and reviews are forms of communication, from the taster/writer to the reader. If you are able to communicate what you tasted and what you thought of it, then the words you used were fine, regardless of how technically correct, exact, vague, metaphorical, or whatever.
This probably says more about me than I would desire, but there are terms like ‘flinty’ that evoke very specific taste memories for me because I have actually put flint in my mouth. Don’t ask why. And don’t judge too harshly.
I think a great deal of the debate and consternation of some descriptors revolves around the fact that those reading them have absolutely no reference to whatever the descriptor is. How may lifelong city dwellers have never smelled or tasted wild honeysuckle? Or old, dusty leather? What about a real barnyard. To say nothing about the variations in that one word due to the different animals that may inhabit said barnyard? Let’s be honest horse, cow, sheep, goat, pig, chicken, etc. all have distinct contributions to the scent of a barnyard. Few save country folk ever have an appreciation of the differences.
In the end words are poor tools to communicate something so specific yet varied as scents, tastes, or sensations. And without direct experience to what is being described words are meaningless. What would the word ‘chile’ mean you you if you had never seen or heard of one before? And without more descriptive terms what would that word mean to you if it were a bell pepper vs a jalapeno vs a habenero?
No, we do the best we can to communicate with the imperfect tools we have. We can do no more.
I actually do relate certain aspects of “minerality” to real experiences in various environments. If you walk around Yosemite, you’ll definitely sense the smell of “granite”, which will be different if it’s a dry day or a wet day. Nevermind that this smell may not be due to the granite itself, but it still makes me think of it (and anyone who has had that experience should be able to relate). Or working in the yard, digging into dry soil, or moist soil after a rain; or walking around the sand stone rocks of the south west; all of those and many more give us (or me, at least) descriptors which I can find useful in describing the “mineral” aspects of wine.
The sense of minerality we are reaching to describe may just be a measure of the dryness and acidity of a wine, but it would be a boring world where all we did is say “this wine is quite dry and has a lot of acidity”
It seems to me that there are as many concepts of minerality as wine drinkers exist…
Anyway, since I took the stupid decision to participate in wine forums, I use the term minerality very often. I think of it as a basic component, a delicate component, to balance mainly the sweetness of the fruit, but also, to a certain degree, the tannin, and the acidity. From my understanding, all elegant, well-balanced wines show a complex minerality that is not masked by other components…
Agree. I love all of the descriptors, great and small, that trusted tasters use to describe taste and emotional perceptions in wines. When certain guys use minerality, I know what I’m in for. Plus if we cannot use minerality, (which, granted, might not be a real word), then we cannot use any perceptual metaphors to describe wine, not even the variety/varietal (that’s a little tongue in cheek). We would be reduced to, ‘Last night I drank purple fermented grape juice.’ Hell, we might have to throw out purple as some people are color blind
I agree. I think great wine is very hard to describe, for me in fact that’s the sign that it’s a great wine, words become inadequate. In the same vein, I think Broadbent once described a classic Mouton as ‘a Winston Churchill of a wine.’
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