The chemical and sensory bases of the wine minerality

The origin of the term minerality is recent, born in the 1980s with Robert Parker coining the term “wet stones”. Subsequently, other versions of the same concept are used by journalists, sommeliers, gurus, and are generally associated with lack of fruit, tannins, wood, concentration in the mouth or higher acidity or lower pH.

There are, however, different opinions among those who believe in minerality as bonds of wine to the terroir and those who regard it as a term without any kind of scientific basis.

Antonio Palacios, in the first part of the report presented at Enoforum 2017, offers a synthesis of the internationally performed scientific work on molecules, sensory attributes and viticultural factors associated with this term. Subsequently, he presents the main conclusions of his team’s important research work focused on finding a correlation between the sensory base and the chemical composition of wine.

By working with two panels of professional tasters (producers and journalists), with various white and red wines internationally recognized for their mineral character and with synthetic wines enriched with the molecules identified as responsible for this attribute, it was possible to identify the types of wine related to minerality, chemicals and sensory attributes that are closer to or farther away from this sensorial note, the influence of subjective factors and extrinsic factors, and finally strategies that can be implemented in the various stages of vinification and aging to increase sensation of minerality in wine.

The presentation reproduced in this video-seminar was presented at the 10th edition of Enoforum (May 16th-18th, 2017, Vicenza, Italy) in the module organized in collaboration with Tebaldi