One of my goals in wine education is to make it less snooty. Wine should not only be enjoyed by a few, rather it should be enjoyed by the masses. There is a constant line in the sand that separates oenophile aficionados and the wine neophyte. I wish this line wasn’t there, but it is and I try to help people step over the line and become more comfortable with wine. Too many people are afraid to ask questions; afraid that they will look stupid. And that is just wrong!
Carl Sagan stated that “every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question,” and I believe that whole-heartedly. Dear Abby was known to say, “There is no such thing as a stupid question if it’s sincere. Better to ask and risk appearing stupid than to continue on your ignorant way and make a stupid mistake.”
With that being said, there is something that is repeatedly mistaken in the wine world, that should not be; no matter if you are a cognoscente or a dilettante. You can have zero understanding of wine but this mistake really has nothing to do with wine; it has to do with grammar. The confusion of variety vs. varietal.
Yeah, it drives me crazy. Sort of like nails on a chalk board or getting a piece of aluminum foil in your mouth. When someone calls a wine a varietal, it isn’t that they lack wine education it’s that they lack a basic understanding of grammar! It is truly uncomplicated; variety is a noun, and varietal is an adjective.
If we return to elementary school, we learned that “a noun is a word (other than a pronoun) used to identify any of a class of people, places, or things.” Whereas an adjective is “a word that modifies or describes a noun or pronoun. Adjectives can be used to describe the qualities of someone or something independently or in comparison to something else.”
How did this problem come about? According to Wikipedia (and we know how much we can trust that), The term was popularized in the US by Maynard Amerine at the University of California, Davis after Prohibition seeking to encourage growers to choose optimal vine varieties, and later promoted by Frank Schoonmaker in the 1950s and 1960s, ultimately becoming widespread during the California wine boom of the 1970s. (winepros.com.au. Oxford Companion to Wine. “varietal”. Archived from the original on 2008-07-26. Retrieved 2008-08-05)
Old World wines do not typically state the grapes that are in the wine, rather they highlight a region and it is up to us to know what the grape is. For example, Chablis on the label means that it is Chardonnay. Burgundy is typically going to be Pinot Noir and Vino Nobile di Montepulciano is Sangiovese. However, the New World doesn’t follow this philosophy. Instead wine labels customarily displays the grape that is in the wine; Chardonnay, Pinot Noir or Sangiovese.
It began innocently enough. A wine was promulgated that if it was made primarily from a single grape variety, and which typically displays the name of that variety on the wine label, it was a varietal wine. This makes sense. If a wine is composed of a single variety, even if it has multiple varieites in the blend, a well made wine will have varietal characteristics.
Chardonnay’s varietal characteristics are that it is a dry, medium- to full-bodied wine with moderate acidity and alcohol. Its flavors range from apple and lemon to papaya and pineapple, and it also shows notes of vanilla when it’s aged with oak. Pinot Noir is a dry, light- to medium-bodied, with bright acidity, silky tannins and alcohol that ranges between 12–15% with flavors of cherry, raspberry, mushroom and forest floor. While Sangiovese is known for its earthy and savory flavors along with its unmistakable (to me) sour cherry.
Botany, the study of plants, is also a determining factor as to why the grape should be called variety vs. varietal. Remember, King Philip Came Over For Great Sex? The mnemonic to remember the taxonomy hierarchy.(Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species) was extremely helpful to me. Sidebar- there is now Domain above Kingdom which blows my mind, always learning something new! I guess the mnemonic would now have to be DID King Philip Come Over For Great Sex?
This is where the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom vary. In zoological taxonomy, subspecies is the only taxonomic rank below that of species, while in Botany and Mycology (fungus), there is a sub-rank known as variety. In terms of animals, subspecies designates a population that is capable of reproducing (defined by being a species) within a geographic region, but is genetically different. For example, man’s best friend is a subspecies. The species is Canis lupis. There are 38 subspecies of Canis lupis. Both Canis lupis albus (wolf) and Canis lupis familiaris (domestic dog) are subspecies. They are genetically similar but have enough distinction that they are separated, however, they can successfully mate.
The equivalent to subspecies in plants are varieties. They are genetically similar to the species, but naturally have distinguishable DNA. These attributes may be such things as different colored flowers, lack of thorns, variegation or height or spread. There is no such thing as a varietal in the taxonomy world.
So please stop using the term varietal in the wrong context. The vines themselves, along with the berries they produce are varieites, falling under the genus and species Vitis vinifera. When you are drinking a wine, the flavors and aromatics are the varietal characteristics. BUT keep asking questions. Wine should be fun and you should never feel embarrassed to ask a question. Leave a question in the comments, and I’d be happy to answer them non-judgmentally.
~Slàinte!
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