Have you finished your two weeks without wine? No? Then stop reading. No working ahead here. Finish those two weeks and then come back. I mean it. Stop..reading…right…now!
Aw hell, how am I going to keep you from reading ahead? Let’s go ahead with this chapter.
What gives a wine it’s color? Pigment.
Pigment is not a word we encounter very often. People who study skin colors probably use it a lot. So do people who work with paints. But we wine enthusiasts don’t typically think about pigment.
Fortunately, we won’t have to think about pigment for very long. As long as you can grasp the fairly simple concept here, you’ll be able to leave pigment behind. I should also point out that I have no scientific data that backs up what I’m about to say. A scientist (a chemist maybe) will tell me that I’m wrong. But what I’m trying to do here is explain a concept, so pigments are a useful tool.
Consider an aboriginal tribe that uses colored paints to decorate their faces. They get the colors from different natural sources: roots, leaves, and so on. They can crush those roots up, mix them with some water, and voila! We have a basic paint. (All paints are really made up of two things: pigment, for the color, and a binding agent that sticks to the pigment and to the surface that gets painted.)
Imagine, if you will, that a tribe member is responsible for creating a yellow paint. The tribe knows that if you dig up a particular root and mash it up, it will produce the appropriate shade of yellow face paint. Our tribe member digs up the proper root and grinds it into a perfect deep yellow color.
Before he can mix the powder with water to create the paint, however, he is interrupted by something. (We need a bit of a delay, so the interruption can’t be one of his tribe mates asking him a question. It needs to be something a bit more substantial. A stampede of some kind that causes our paintmaker to be out of commission for a few days. How about a stampede of aardvarks? That should do it.) A stampede of aardvarks kicks up immense amounts of dust, causing our tribe member’s asthma to kick up. The tribe’s shaman prescribes three days of bed rest, and our yellow powder waits patiently.
If you’ve ever left a piece of fruit sit for too long, you know what happens–it changes color. The same thing happens to our tribe’s yellow powder. After our paintmaker is well again, he goes over to his yellow powder and discovers that it has turned from deep yellow to almost a dark mustard color. What caused this? Pigment. Pigment that changed due to exposure to air for a few days. Like our changing fruit, this particular root changes color when left alone for a while.
Please say goodbye to our paintmaker and think about this. As time goes by (I hear a song in there somewhere), the pigments in the powder change and the color changes as a result. Because wine’s color is caused by pigments, you can bet that with time, the color of wine will change. That’s a good bet to make!
The color of wine gives us some information about it. Deeper, murkier colors usually accompany more flavorful wines. This, of course, is no surprise to anyone who drinks tea or coffee–if it looks watered down, it tastes watered down. The same goes for wines–if a wine looks watered down, it will more than likely taste watered down.
The color of a wine can also tell us something about the age of the wine. For a moment, we need to consider red and white wines separately. As you might guess, the two types of wine have different colors.
White wines can be described by thinking about a color spectrum. Instead of the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet that we see in a rainbow, we have a narrower spectrum of colors. White wines can go from being almost clear to slightly greenish with hints of yellow to pale yellow to deep yellow to gold to amber to brown. A younger wine should be closer to the clear end of that spectrum. An older wine should be making progress toward the amber end of the spectrum. A young white wine that appears brown in the glass probably has something wrong with it. It will usually end up being poured down the drain (although the bacteria in your waste treatment system will probably thank you for helping them throw a party).
Red wines, on the other hand, usually start out very deep and dark purple. From there they become more like a ruby color, then garnet, then brick red, then brown. Like with white wines, a young wine that appears to be brown may end up saving the bacteria from having to make a beer run. A young red wine should be more toward the purple and ruby end of the spectrum. Don’t forget, too, that the more intense the color, the more intense the wine should be.
Are you ready for your next homework assignment? Brace yourself–you’re going to need two different wines of the same color, i.e. two whites or two reds. Get two wine glasses while you’re at it. Pour yourself a glass of wine and study the color. Many people tilt the glass at a forty-five degree angle and look down through the wine where it is not very deep against the glass. That, along with a nice white background, will often help you see the colors better. Where would you put the color of this wine on our color spectrum? (If your eyes cannot tell the difference between a red wine and a white wine, please go have your vision checked by a competent and qualified medical professional. Seriously. Go ahead, the rest of us will wait.)
Now pour the second class of wine and study its color. Is it different from the first wine? Hopefully it is. If you remember back to grade school, you wrote plenty of papers where you were told to compare and contrast two things. Write yourself a mental paper comparing and contrasting the color of the two wines. Or, if you want, write it down on real paper. Or in your word processor. Whatever. Are you able to explain the differences and similarities using words? Good!
Okay–this is the last time I will ask. Did you finish your wine-less two weeks yet? If so, you get to drink one or both glasses that you poured for this exercise. If not, you’re going to have to be patient and wait until the two weeks is up before you get to taste the wines. Sorry–but you really need to stick to the program!
Leave a comment or two to let us know how your color study is going. Or are you just blowing it off?
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