I was alerted to a topic on the Colour of Wine on the Netscape Forum, and wished the topic had been posted here so I could join in (my problem with Netscape is another topic that is off topic here). Someone said they wished there was a poster/chart that listed all the colours of wine - well there is. I've seen it. It was in French and a limited edition poster put out by a wine company, whose name I can't remember right now. They also put out a poster of the tastes of wine. Both these posters consisted of rows and rows of glasses, with explanations in French (and possibly English) below each glass.
I would sure love a copy of each of these posters.
As for naming colours, if I want to get more specific than dark red, fading brown-red in a red wine, I use gemstones or fruit colours mainly to correlate what I am seeing. Blackberry is a favourite for young wines that look like blackberries with their shiny lustre, their deep opaque black-red colour that is saturated almost to the rims, and the brighter crimson on the edges. Often used for young Aussie Shiraz.
But what about the gemstones, and in particular ruby and garnet?
Ruby is the most expensive red gemstone and a wine with a ruby hue should be bright and translucent rather than opaque. It shouldn't have any purple. It shouldn't have any black.
Did you know that ruby in the gem world is actually a form of corundum (aluminium oxide)? Red gem quality corundum is always called ruby while other gem quality corundums of all colours are sapphires and although most people think of sapphires as blue, they can be pink, yellow or green as well.
It seems that Garnet has historically been used for an older wine, and is still taught as such in courses like the Court of Master Sommeliers, but I think this is misleading as garnet has a whole array of colours from yellow browns to deep red black to purple violet. In fact if you see cheaper garnet jewellery - the stuff that is polished into little beads - it often has those violet hues. It is a colour to me that indicates youth in a wine, like many young NZ pinot noirs. And to many of the younger generation who wear those garnet beads, this is the colour they would think of, I'm sure.
Garnet, in the gem world, is a cheaper stone than ruby, it often has flaws (cracks and inclusions of other minerals) hence the stone is not always translucent unless cut very thin.
The pyrope garnet is the brightest of all the garnets and at its best could be confused with ruby, perhaps except for the blacker hues it imparts. Then there is the beautiful almandine garnet, which at its best is a deep red black to purple violet and often opaque in the core. It can also be a brownish red. Somewhere between the two stones is a pinky-red garnet called rhodolite.
A spessartine garnet has more of an orangey-red colour and doesn't have the intensity and depth that the redder garnets have.
A hessonite garnet is usually yellow brown.
Grossular comes in many colours but when red, is always orangey- red and never has the depth of the almandine or pyrope. And if you want to get into the rare side of garnets, there are some very rare, deep green varieties of grossular called Tsavorite.
If you have seen these stones both in the rough and made into jewellery, you will realise that the historical use of garnet in the wine world is so misleading - especially to anyone who wears those common black-red / purple-red violet beads, which during the course of writing this spiel, I have found are now very often dyed. Click here for pictures of garnet beads available today - and scroll to the subsequent pages as you will see the colour of natural garnet beads as well as dyed.
I don't believe we should be hanging on to the older meanings of words, such as garnet to indicate an older wine, just for the sake of it. It is up to the current generation of wine educators, wine writers, wine enthusiasts, people who post on wine discussion forums, to change the meanings of the historical words to have some bearing on the the real life parallels of todays drinkers. And this is why, when I describe a wine as garnet, I usually add a prefix of red-black, orange-red, almandine, pyrope, etc. And now after seeing those dyed beads, I will use purple-violet garnet more often too for a wine that is purple violet and has a gemmy appearance.
Now that said, I had a gorgeous Morris Liqueur Muscat the other day that was the colour of a gem-cut Scottish cairngorm.
Cheers,
Sue
PS If you think this was overly ranted, wait until I get on to 'mineral' (in another thread at another time).
