Finding Balance in Your Wine

As in Life, balance is essential in wine.  For years our image of wine here in the USA has been what California produced.  Often those wines were an assault of fruit to our palette. California's flagship region is Napa Valley.  Yet this region does not resemble the original climates of the grapes that grow there.  In a word, it's a lot hotter in Napa than in Bordeaux.

What you get when grapes have the opportunity to ripen to the maximum level are wines that lack acidity.  For most grapes it's a simple formula: the higher the sugar (ripening) the less the acid. You end up with what has become to known as "fruit bombs."

The problem is that those ultra-fruit wines are hard to take after a glass or two.  What they lack is the crispness of acids.  Here in the Umpqua Valley the climate helps insure that our wines have a balance of fruit and acids.

Like many people that made their way to Oregon via California it took me awhile to adjust to the more layered wines of our region.   What I have learned is that balanced wines are the holy grail of wine.  All benchmark wines are a balance between fruit and acid.