Hi there,

Hop in — we’re going lesson planning!

I’m spending this afternoon prepping for tomorrow’s tasting at Cecily. While that class is sold out, I don’t see any reason not to share some tools and approaches for those of you who might want to play along at home (or lead a staff training).

This falls under the 'waxing crescent — taste 🌒‘ segment of my somewhat elaborate wine study schema, the laying down roots / setting intentions part of the cycle where we explore the languages we use to describe wine, what makes a wine ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and how that shakes out when we’re serving and pouring the stuff.

‘Minerality’ is a powerful concept to use to open these ideas up.

At the most basic level, it’s a word that a lot of regular drinkers have heard wine professionals use — and often, that they’ve picked up for themselves.

(I can speak to a couple hundred of these interactions over the summer at Bridges, where ‘minerally white’ runs straight into ‘Chablis-as-concept’.)

The interesting thing here is that this is a relatively new phenomenon. Even in professional circles, you don’t see it pop up in tasting notes or wine writing before the late 1980s, and the trickle-down to my guests probably doesn’t happen until just about the time I was getting into wine, a decade and a half ago.

It’s also the case that regular drinkers see the word as fairly straightforward. Call it ‘dry white ++’. Maybe it’s a shade saltier and more savory than something that’s just ‘crisp’— maybe there’s an implication of an electric spine of acidity, and a desire for less lees-y or malo-y creaminess and texture — but even with some shading of meaning, they still see it as pretty unambiguous. They’re often surprised to learn that in wine professional circles, it’s heavily contested and weighed down with discourse term, the subject of endless symposia, blog posts, panel discussions, specialist articles, etc etc.

(Picking an article at random from the first page of a quick google: “The Word ‘Minerality’ Is Divisive Among Expert Tasters—Everyone Needs to Calm Down” from Jason Wilson last spring in Wine Enthusiast. Good luck, Jason!)

I think part of the problem here is that, in professional communities, the meaning of “minerality” starts to branch and proliferate: sometimes it’s talked about as a taste, sometimes as texture, sometimes as aroma — and sometimes, as an indeterminate marker of dimension, quality, length, and persistence, often linked to farming, and specifically to the bedrock under the soils that the vines are rooted in.

Apart from these slippages, this last bit is the real heart of the matter, and I think why it ends up provoking the contention that it does. It starts to pry open questions like, does soil speak through a grapevine? can wine transmit place? what name do we give to that feeling?

I spend about 9 minutes (edited down from 20 minutes of footage and about 40 minutes of walking!) talking through all of this below — give it a listen if you’d like to hear me finish unpacking:

Otherwise, it’s time for the fun part — the practical bit.

I’m giving you a fairly open framework here, since the amount of time you have, the number of people tasting with you, the context of how and why you’ve all come together, etc, is going to vary significantly.

When I used to write (much more involved) lesson plans while getting my certificate in English language teaching to adults, we were taught to always start with a hook: an icebreaking question, a prompt, or a short activity. This doesn’t have to be elaborate! In fact, it can be as simple as “where are you coming from today?” or “have you ever called a wine ‘mineral-ly’ before?”

Here, we might start by tasting a first wine together — something that’s electric and bone-dry — and talk through the physical sensation of acidity as we let our heads hang forward and our mouths drop open. Do you feel like you’re about to drool on the table?

Wines I’m picking for this are as close to the platonic ideal of “regular person’s ‘minerally white’” as I can get: salty, pretty aromatically neutral, not too richly textured. I want them refreshing, but not necessarily screamingly high acid, and I’m not yet looking for super reductive, smoky aromatics.

Some examples: aligoté from Goisot in the Yonne; Jochen Beurer’s Württemberg sylvaner; weissburgunder from the Brand brothers in the Pfalz; Usonia’s Finger Lakes cayuga; grüner veltliner from the Schödl siblings in the Weinvertl; Guillaume Lavie’s melon b in Muscadet …

The big icebreaking question here is, “If you asked for a wine with minerality, would this wine make you happy?”

Depending on time/inclination, you might taste a second wine side-by-side against our first relatively innocuous contender. In my mind this would be something that has a little more of something.

Maybe it’s a classic Sancerre from a grower like Gérard Boulay, a Steiermark sauvignon blanc from Sepp Muster, or a leaner, saltier albariño from a great producer like Nanclares (more aromatic); a super-austere Mosel riesling from someone like Clemens Busch or Weiser-Künstler (more acidity); a high-end Chablis from a natural grower like Duplessis, de Moor, or Athenaïs de Béru (more creaminess); or a potentially warmer-climate white like a xarello from Mas Candí, a verdicchio from La Distesa, or a robola di Cephalonia from Sclavos (more ripeness/texture).

(You could even pour this one blind, especially if it’s from a classic region / culty producer / has a higher price tag.)

My question here would be, “Is one of these wines ‘more mineral’ than the other?”

You may get some interesting results ! Super high acid wines sometimes read to people, in their sharp-sour mouth-puckering way, as “sweet” rather than “dry”. Aromatic varieties like albariño, riesling, or sauvignon blanc might feel like too much (“sweet” in a different way). Ironically, a well-farmed Chablis without a bunch of sulfur and sterile filtration might feel too rich, especially if it’s from a warm recent vintage. On the other hand, maybe the leading quality of ‘more mineral’ gives an advantage to wines with more intensity?

Tactile–visual materials help people who process information better when it’s not in lecture format and break up the energy of a class. It’s also fun, imo, to cluster people into small groups in order to 1) disrupt the top-down flow of information 2) give quieter / more introverted folks a chance to participate actively 3) encourage connections between participants. In an ideal world you’d break everyone into groups of 4–6 here and then pull everyone together to compare notes.

This is a simple little sheet ready to cut out into slips of paper, with a couple dozen tasting notes on the two pages — about half textural and half aromatic.

Which of these belongs under the heading ‘minerality’? Which don’t? Sort them as a group into the categories you think they should be under.

In feedback, you’ll probably find that groups have points of difference and have reached different conclusions! Make sure to budget enough time to talk about those together before moving on to the next part of the program.

Having identified (probably!) some aromatics that we’re all associating with minerality, it’s time to double down.

A crowdpleasing way to do this is to go to a volcanic island like Tenerife in the Canarias: Envínate’s “Táganan” or “Benje” blancos, Borja Pérez, Dolores Cabrera, etc.

As long as we’re here with a little micro-regional study, some other options open up. For example, some of the intense, sulferic, iodine-y reduction will be too much for tasters. Others may register them as “funky”, either pleasantly or less-so.

When is reduction too much? Is this the only way a wine can be ‘funky’?

(Bonus points for using this as an opportunity to dig into service by vigorously decanting one of the wines to see if incorporating oxygen makes it more accessible.)

Another option is to open the door here to red, rosé, or orange wine.

Is white wine the only color that can have minerality? What would a “mineral red” look like?

There are a few different answers, I think, but the reds from the producers above give one idea.

(Other “can red wine be minerally?” ideas: Loire pineau d’aunis from Pierre-Olivier Bonhomme, Bellivière, Julien Pineau, or Ben Courault; volcanic gamay from the Auvergne a.k.a. the Loire Volcanique from Tricot; Eyrie trousseau in the Willamette Valley; pais from Roberto Henríquez or Leo Erazo; infusion-y co-ferments from Vino di Anna on Etna…)

Finally, we get to the trickiest bit: the degree to which minerality means feeling the bedrock through the vines and into your glass.

There’s one place that I’ve gone for years to facilitate exploration of this question: the Loire. Specifically, the Loire’s heart, where the tuffeau chalk-limestone that was the floor of shallow tropical seas 75 million years ago turns, as you drive west into Anjou, into blue-black metamorphic schist, the remnants of 75 million year-old volcanic activity.

It’s one of the most dramatic faultlines in the world of wine, because everything else — grape varieties, climate, regulatory structure — is more or less the same. There’s no better way to pose the question of what difference bedrock makes, in my mind, than to taste chenin from Saumur or Montlouis next to chenin from the Layon or Savennières in Anjou. Here’s what I poured the last time I did a Loire side-by-side.

(The houses are built from local stone — and so, when you’re driving west from Saumur into Anjou and look out your window, you can see the geology changing in front of your eyes, like this):

In Anjou, my recommended producers for this game are legion. Beyond well-known (and scarce, and hounded by collectors) names like Richard Leroy, Stéphane Bernaudeau, and Mark Angeli, there are many who are still attainable and working at a comparable level — Thomas Batardière, Ben Courault, and Tessa at Domaine aux Moines come to mind, to say nothing of little guys like Les Errances, Philippe Delmée, Jardins de Fleury, Julie & Toby Bainbridge, etc.

Over in limestone country, you can go as far east as Montlouis and Vouvray (just be careful of residual sugar). A grab-bag of mostly-younger names out there might include Frantz Saumon, Grange Tiphaine, Thomas Puechavy, Alexandre Gicquel, Clos Therrière, and Michel Autran, in no particular order.

In Saumur, meanwhile, pricing and style are looking more and more like white Burgundy (especially with somebody like Château Yvonne or Collier) — but there are plenty of solid folks like Fosse-Séche or Arnaud Lambert.

What I will insist on, though, is that if you play the game compare bedrock, no matter whether in the world you do it, you follow certain rules:

No herbicides — this game requires a living soil microbiome, rock-eating fungal hyphae tunneling into crystal latticework, strong native yeast fermentations, etc. If your soils are dead and compacted, you don’t get to play!

No irrigation + synthetic fertilizers (similar idea)

No inoculation, no added yeast nutrients (you want the fermentation connected at some level to conditions in the vines)

No sterile filtration (you want to keep that tasty dry extract around as much as possible). To that end, you’ll want to be careful of aggressive cold-settling of the must, too…

These conditions met, go nuts! The rocks are endless — so are the possibilities.

By now, with 5–6 wines poured and minerality explored from almost every angle, you’re probably about an hour in. It’s about now that you want to make sure you’ve carved out space to talk through everything. (This is ultimately more important than trying to stuff in additional information.)

What were peoples’ favorites? Revisit the minerality activity: would they still keep everything the same? Which wine had the ‘most minerality’ of the lineup? Which wine changed the most over time?

Outside of the all-important feedback phase, I like feedback too!

Was this framework helpful? Did you use it to organize a tasting or teach a staff training? What wines did you pour? What did people think?

Let me know! Drop me a note, send pictures — I’d love to see what you’re up to.

(And I’d love to continue to produce helpful public resources for wine education. If you’d like to help support that work, you can do so via our Patreon.)

It’s time to step out and pick up my last bottle for class tomorrow — talk soon.

<3,

grape kid