Smooth Wine Defined

The wine portion of my web site is dedicated to smooth red wine and nothing else. What is smooth wine? I'm glad you asked.

Smooth wine is delicate, complex, and has no bite. It starts with fruit flavors on the tongue, brings in various flavors in the mid palate (herbs, anise, bark, oak, cinnamon, vanilla, toast), and finishes very long and smooth. The long finish is the most important characteristic of a smooth wine - the alcohol stays hidden and there's no "power" finish. It just melts away, leaving fragrant aromas behind.

Does that mean smooth wine is tasteless? No. The challenge is to keep a wine interesting and complex while remaining smooth. For me, the best wines come from what I call the black fruits - Zinfandel, Cabernet, Syrah. As opposed to the red fruits - Pinot Noir, San Giovese, Malbec, etc. Notice that a glass of even young pinot noir will have a slight orange tint around the edge, and after five years the orange really becomes noticeable (that's oxygenation, which I'll talk about soon). This may not be a fair characterization, but if you stay with me you're going to learn about Zinfandel and Cabernet.

Please keep in mind that I'm not a wine professional. I just know what I like, and I want to share it with you.

The wines I know and love come almost exclusively from Northern California. There is a whole world of French and European wines that I am just starting to learn about. I know there are wonderful smooth wines made in Europe, and I look forward to discovering them. But it's a much more difficult problem and results from year to year are not as consistent. In general, wines from France need more time in the bottle and don't want to be served young. But I have found that almost any Bordeaux tastes better after an hour in the glass than it does right out of the bottle.

In the following sections, I'll try to tell you what I've learned after three short years of buying, collecting, and trying smooth wines. I hope you'll find it valuable.