Why Do So Many Wines Taste So Different And Why Do So Many Taste The Same?

You hear reports now and then about how many people can’t tell the difference between a red wine and a white wine if tasted blind, much less one red or white wine from another. This is no cause for being smug for the simple reason that all wines are nothing but fermented grape juice, and a great number of white wines are made from red grapes.

The fact is that wine experts make mistakes all the time about what they’re tasting, including Harry Waugh, a legendary British connoisseur who, when asked when was the last time he’d mistaken a Bordeaux for a Burgundy, responded, “What time was lunch?” Which is one of the reasons American wine critic Robert Parker refused ever to taste wines blind. The prospects of committing a whopper of an error are huge.

Still, those who labor intensely, sometimes for years, and often fail exams as often as would-be lawyers to become an officially designated Master of Wine (there are only 418 in the world) have developed exceptional ability to distinguish one wine from another, one region from another, even one vintage from another. If you think that is a worthwhile pursuit—those who do so go to work in the wine trade—prepare to spend most of your free time and a great deal of your money on achieving that prestigious title.

For the rest of us, distinguishing one wine from another is helpful in choosing which bottle goes with whatever it is you’re eating, or to have a little fun: Once, when a sommelier challenged me to try to identify a wine he poured (with the bottle far removed from my sight), I played along. When he went to another part of the room, I called over a busboy, gave him five bucks and asked him to tell me what the wine label read. When the sommelier returned, I hemmed and hawed and mumbled remarks like, “It seems to be from a higher elevation, but definitely not California.” I then hugged and told the sommelier exactly what wine it was, including the vintage. His astonishment was palpable.

Let’s get basic here: Wines taste different for two reasons. First, the wine grape itself, of which there are 10,000, and second, where the grapes are grown. There’s little question that most people with just the slightest familiarity with wine can tell the difference between, say, a Chardonnay and a Gewürztraminer or a Riesling, because they have very different flavor profiles. So, too, Cabernet Sauvignon tastes quite different from a Syrah or a Zinfandel.

The onion gets sliced more thinly when it comes to differentiating between a Chardonnay and a Pinot Blanc or a Cabernet Sauvignon and a Cabernet Franc. And it would be something of a feat for most serious wine drinkers to bet their souls on telling the difference between a Barolo and a Barbaresco, both made in Italy’s Piedmont from the Nebbiolo grape. All these grapes are in the so-called vinifera family; grapes like the Native America labrusca variety taste very different.

Where the grapes are grown and how the wines are made are obviously going to provide nuances to the varietal, simply because the climate and soils, as well as the altitude, will affect the grapes’ growth, ripeness and maturation. A varietal grown in very hot climates like Sicily will make for a bigger, bolder, tannic red wine with higher alcohol, as contrasted with one grown in cool climates like Bordeaux and Burgundy, where, for centuries, through a process called chaptalization, wines from the south of Europe, even Morocco and Algeria, were added to bolster the wines’ taste and alcohol. In much of Europe artificial irrigation is prohibited by law; in California it is not.

Much is made of the components of the soil, including limestone, gravel, sand, etc. Once in the Loire Valley, a producer of Sauvignon Blanc showed me a rich red soil patch he left unplanted because, he explained, “There is too much iron in the soil. It would make my wines taste like they came from California.” On another occasion, in Burgundy, a producer had me taste the grapes from two adjacent plots in his vineyard. I was amazed to find that one had greater natural sugar while the other was bland. “These vineyards have been farmed for hundreds of years,” he said, “but this plot, right next to the other, has never produced good grapes.”

After these two basics, the touchy question of how much winemakers manipulate their wines becomes crucial. Many vignerons insist they want nature to determine the outcome, with minimal interference from the vigneron aside from keeping the vineyards healthy; some do not filter their wines to remove sediment. Others, largely New World wineries, do a great deal to create the flavor profile they want and think the marketplace will, too. Of course, blending grape varietals is a given in Bordeaux when it comes to Cabernet Sauvignon-dominant bottlings, and while that is now more the rule than the exception in California, back in the 1970s and 1980s Napa Valley was deliberately producing monster tannic wines from 100% Cabernet Sauvignon.

There are techniques, like micro-oxygenation to pump up flavors and alcohol, and reverse osmosis to lessen alcohol, but aside from many white wines fermented and aged exclusively in temperature-controlled stainless steel tanks, many others spend some time in oak, and that can make a huge difference in the flavor of what emerges. Oak casks have two functions: one, to let the wines settle and harmonize over months or years, and two, to impart the actual flavor of the wood.

The place where the oak comes from also has its distinctions, with French and American the most frequently used. (In spirits making, the barrels are charred to create more burnt caramel flavors.) New oak has a fresher, greener, more intense wood flavor, while old barrels are widely used for better nuance. But the fact is, one wine from one barrel may taste different from another, even within the same winery in the same vintage, so that it is difficult, if not impossible, to say that the contents of a single bottle will match the next bottle in the line, which puts all the overwrought mumbo-jumbo about a wine tasting of mango, leather, cigar box and so on almost useless, not least because the question of whether or not it’s a good thing to taste of any of those flavors in a wine.

Given these factors of climate, soil and manipulation, the distinctions between a range of wines all made from the same grape become more a matter of personal taste. Chardonnay, for example, is, in and of itself, a fairly neutral-tasting grape that in various locales is used in very different styles, with the induced caramel-rich and woody flavors of American Chardonnays preferred by the U.S. market. French and Italian Chardonnays are more subtle and better nuanced, overall. So, too, you can debate just what you want your Pinot Noir to taste like. Do you like the elegance—sometimes too subtle— of Burgundies, or the big bomb blasts of Sonoma Valley?

So, the answer to the questions to why so many wines taste different and why so many don’t is often a case of consumer preference. And, if you keep on drinking California Chardonnays because you like that taste, you may not even be able to identify a wine from the Côte d’Or as being anything more than a run-of-the-mill white wine. And if you really love mango, leather and cigar box flavors in your wine, be my guest.

But going by point scores, usually on a 100-point scale, is not unlike rating any or all kinds of movies—dramas, melodramas, romances, horror movies, westerns, biker movies—with the same standards and expectations. For one thing, remember that all professional wine tasters, in the media or industry, sample perhaps 20 wines at a clip—all of them on a given day, maybe Charbono or Zinfandel—each from a single bottle and always upon release, with only minimal aging, which would be like saying that a student who get a 97 on his history essay is distinctly smarter than one who got a 94.