By Charles Olken



It is a commonly held belief that acidity is the most important balancing component in wine. While there are differences of opinion about what constitutes sufficient balancing acidity, one would be hard-pressed to find a wine commentator anywhere who would argue that low acidity is a good thing. I am not about to offer a different view on that subject—and yet, I am going to argue that we have come now to rely too much on acidity as a measure of virtue in wines.



Two very specific examples have put the wind up my nose on the merits of high acidity and the lack of acceptability of low acidity. The first is the argument that wines from certain areas, with cold climates and naturally high acidities in the resulting wines, are simply to be preferred to other areas with lower natural acidities. Steve Eliot and I heard this argument many times on our visit last summer to Santa Barbara County. It became a predictable mantra, and while there may have been disagreements among the vintners there about alcohol levels, there was almost no debate, especially for those in the cooler western regions of the County, about the absolute virtues of their more or less universally high acidity.

The problems with that argument are found in the wines of other areas. While it is okay to like your wines the way they turn out, it seems to me that dissing places like the Russian River Valley as inferior because the wines from that place are often lower in acidity ignores a few facts—namely that those latter wines, while not universally bitingly crisp, are still wonderfully in balance, tasty and exciting. Of course, the argument also ignores the existence of plenty of briskly balanced wines as well.

But here is the second problem, or set of problems, if you will. Since when did crackling acidity become a measure of balance? Is not balance a tasting term, not a chemical measurement? And is it not possible for wines to be deliciously in balance even with less than dramatic acidity?

These are not new arguments. We here at CGCW have been making them for years. We have spoken out for balance in Zinfandel when it began to get so late-harvest that ripeness and not fruit too often became its calling card. We have argued that what was missing in California sparkling wine a couple of decades ago was the crisp austerity that gives that product its unique character—and which now, thankfully, is seen almost across the board in mid- to high-priced local versions.

But new argument or not, the search to define balance keeps marching on, and the other day, whether the winery meant it or not, the new Chardonnays from Miner (2009 Wild Yeast and 2010 Napa Valley) have added new fuel to the fire. On the surface, and looking only at chemical statistics, these wines with acidity levels around 0.50%, would seemingly be soft, out of balance and heavy with no vitality in sight. These are not newly minted vintages, after all, with fermenter freshness to carry them. These are wines that have a certain bit of maturity.

So what happened when we tasted them blind—aside from the fact that they finished ahead of several other very good wines in our tasting? It turned out that not one taster called that fat or flabby or tiring to drink or heavy or used any other descriptor to suggest that they were out of balance hedonistically. For sure, no one also described them as brisk, crackling or racy. When we got to the end of our discussions of the wines and opened up their covers, we were very surprised to see their stated acidities. Even for us, the expectation had grown that balanced Chardonnays would necessary be delimited to acidities reaching past 0.60% and closer to 0.70%. These Miner wines were far lower and yet they were in balance to a panel of professionals who have generally tended to like wines with acidity.

There is a bottom line here. It is that acidity by itself is a measure of nothing but acidity. Balance cannot be determined by a set of numbers, does not a priori come only with elevated acidity and is an organoleptic phenomenon, not a laboratory phenomenon. And perhaps we can now come to a new maturity in our discussion of balance in Chardonnay. We can do this by tasting the wines, not reading the labels. This is not new news either, but it has just been reiterated for us by the wines themselves.