Wine Clichés

Cold nights help to retain acidity, as malic acid stops being emitted from the leaves of the plant below a certain temperature. Hence the benefit of coastal sites in CA or high-altitude sites in say Sicily.

Speaking of hot stones, whatever happened to hot wines? For years the Wine Spectator writers, from Marvin Shanken on down, were crazy about the word hot. I once tried to count the number of times it appeared in a single Spectator issue but lost track. I don't see it so much anymore but maybe that's because I've seen it so many times it stopped registering. Or maybe because I've stopped reading the Wine Spectator.

I always assumed that there needed to be a stone of sufficient size so that it could store enough thermal load to be able to radiate it back over a period of time. While smaller stones will get just as hot they should also loose that heat quickly due to the large surface area in relation to the mass of the stone.

But there's plenty of mass to store heat in the ground in general. And a flat surface has an even greater surface area to value ratio - it is like one very big stone!

Assuming the large stones really do work as described (and I wonder if anyone has actually tested this) I think the reason must be that they absorb heat better because they are a solid mass. With soil or gravel, there are lots of air pockets, and these would be bad conductors of heat, effectively insulating layers further down. Laying tarmac between the rows would have the same effect

Cold nights help to retain acidity, as malic acid stops being emitted from the leaves of the plant below a certain temperature. Hence the benefit of coastal sites in CA or high-altitude sites in say Sicily.

I think everyone follows this logic, but the question is why warm stones would also be good for retaining heat in the same sites.

No idea, and Châteauneuf is a hot climate.

Maybe it's a wine cliché?

I always assumed that there needed to be a stone of sufficient size so that it could store enough thermal load to be able to radiate it back over a period of time. While smaller stones will get just as hot they should also loose that heat quickly due to the large surface area in relation to the mass of the stone.

But there's plenty of mass to store heat in the ground in general. And a flat surface has an even greater surface area to value ratio - it is like one very big stone!

Assuming the large stones really do work as described (and I wonder if anyone has actually tested this) I think the reason must be that they absorb heat better because they are a solid mass. With soil or gravel, there are lots of air pockets, and these would be bad conductors of heat, effectively insulating layers further down. Laying tarmac between the rows would have the same effect

The ground is a big heat sink. This is the reason passive cellars and geo-thermal HVAC units work. The rocks that sit on the surface can heat up to the air temperature and then some with the added solar energy. The ground is constantly trying to balance between the heat of above and the cool from below so should be slower to heat and faster to cool. I have never taken any measurements but I would assume that soil temperatures just an inch below the surface would be significantly cooler than the air temperature on a normal summer day. Or thinking of this another way, if you have two stones of the same size but one sits on top of the soil and the other is half buried so that only the top is exposed to the sunlight the buried stone always is cooler.

I wonder if you are not mixing two phenomena - the cliche and the pun. Playing with words such as the examples you give for Zinfandel is simply punning and in that I agree with Oscar Levant that "indeed the pun is the lowest form of humor, unless you thought of it first".

Punning on the name, 'Zinfandel'? Who would stoop to such primitivo humour....?

Not a strictly a cliche, but the words "Reserve" on anything that's $7.99 and produced in batches of 60,000 barrels. I guess it could be a reserve part of a run of 600,000 barrels.

I once stood up at a tasting given by Kendall Jackson, who make a basic wine, Vintner's reserve' and a supposedly upscale version, 'Grand Reserve' and asked the question "Is it correct to say that anything that doesn't go down the drain at KJ has the name 'reserve' applied to it?" They finally agreed that was so after a short spate of waffling that would have done a passle of lawyers proud.

As for language, everyone is in the same boat as far as trying to describe taste in wine - a standard lexicon that is hard to master plus a bunch of idiosyncratic more personalized terms that mean different things to different people. Wine advertising is a combination of this (when trying to tout the sensory aspects of enjoying the wine) mixed together with the vocabulary of the travel writer trying to get you to associate a product with good things by mentioning in combination with other words that people generally will perceive as being a Good Thing even if they have zip to do with the wine.

The classic example of this, taking a single term that has wine association and turning it into a buzzword (that is, a word with automatic knee jerk warm fuzzy feelings not requiring any actual thought). I always wondered if they buried Robert Mondavi in an oak coffin; if not, it certainly would have been fitting for the King of Oak. Those 'Woodbridge=oak=good' commercials are probably taught in product pimp ...er, advertising schools

PS - the way the wine is made, the climate of the area, the barrels it is aged in and the quaint surroundings and tradition of the area where it is produced are irrelevant.

There is only one thing that matters, and that is how the wine tastes. I used to get this all the time when travelling in California visiting tasting rooms, where they wanted to show you the winery (often no more than a glorified tank farm) before allowing you to taste the wine. I always responded that I wanted to taste the wine first because if I didn't like it, why would I want to waste my time looking at a winery? Some of them got it, some of them didn't. Same thing with tasting regimen, where some wanted you to taste through a flight of crap before you got to the 2 or 3 wines you were interested in. One of the insistent ones got a letter from me, copied to the California government, questioning their practice of forcing wine on people, many driving cars, that didn't want it before they were allowed to taste what they had come for. Got a nice (probably form) letter from the government, and predictably nothing from the winery.

But I guess the ad men couldn't justify their existence if they simply told peolple the product was good, they should try it.

Two of my favorites:

I’m not a wine connoisseur, but…

You should drink what you like.