Blind White: High Acid at 13.5% and a Bitter Grip
Glass one, served at 11 °C, no label, poured from a decanter after 20 minutes. Appearance: pale gold with a green fleck at the rim, medium intensity, slow thick tears. Nose: medium-plus intensity - quince paste, yellow plum, chamomile, a distinct lanolin/wet-wool note, wet stone, a struck-match reduction that mostly blows off, and a leesy bread-dough edge. Palate: dry, high acid, medium-plus body, alcohol feels warm and is later confirmed at 13.5%, medium finish with a chalky, faintly bitter phenolic grip. No new oak - no vanilla, no toast, no sweet spice. Natural cork, moderate fine sediment, bottle apparently several years old.
1. State your working hypothesis and show how each structural datum constrains it. Which two varieties must you actively exclude, and on what evidence?
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Working hypothesis: Chenin Blanc, dry, from a cool but sunlit site - Loire (Savennières/Anjou sec) first, old-vine South African second.
How the data constrain it
- High acid at 13.5% is the load-bearing clue. Most varieties that hold this much acid at this alcohol are late-ripening and thick-skinned; most that reach 13.5% soften their acid. Chenin does both.
- No new oak removes Chardonnay-as-default and rules out a modern oaked white.
- Lanolin plus lees and chamomile says extended lees contact or old-vine concentration, not stainless tank fruit.
- The bitter, chalky phenolic grip is the fingerprint. It is a Chenin signature (and a Rhône white one) and is largely absent in Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc.
- The struck match is reduction from lees work and low oxygen, not a fault, and it argues against a heavily racked, filtered commercial wine.
Exclusions
- Sauvignon Blanc: no pyrazine at all - no grass, no boxwood, no grapefruit pith, and the body is too broad.
- Chardonnay: either it sees oak (absent) or it is lean and Chablis-like at 12–12.5% with a different texture. It does not deliver quince, lanolin and a bitter phenolic finish together.
Also unlikely: Riesling (too low in alcohol, no bitter grip), Grüner Veltliner (no white pepper or lentil).
2. What single additional observation would most efficiently separate your top two candidates, and where would you look for it?
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Top two: Loire Chenin (Savennières/Anjou sec) vs. old-vine South African Chenin.
The discriminator is the fruit-ripeness axis against the acid axis - tasted, not read.
- Look at the mid-palate and the finish, not the nose. Loire Chenin keeps a green-apple and saline spine even at 13.5%, and the bitter grip arrives late and stays. Warm-climate old-vine Chenin pushes riper - bruised yellow apple, honeysuckle, sometimes a beeswax or lanolin sweetness - and the acid, while present, sits behind the fruit rather than in front of it.
- Second place to look: the reduction. A persistent struck-match note with lees is more typical of tightly made Loire Chenin than of most Cape examples.
- Third: the sediment and closure. Fine sediment and natural cork in a wine of this age points to a small-production, low-intervention bottling, which skews Loire in most markets - but this is corroboration, not proof.
Cheap falsification test: ask for a small pour warmed to 15 °C and re-taste. Alcohol and bitterness amplify with warmth. If the wine turns hot and harsh, it is the riper, higher-alcohol expression; if it stays tight and stony, it is the cooler-site wine.
3. You are putting this wine on the by-the-glass list. Set the serve, the price and the food match, and show the arithmetic.
Read the worked answer
Serve. 11–12 °C - not colder, or the lanolin and quince vanish and only acid remains. A short decant is worth the effort: it disperses the reduction without stripping the wine. Use a medium tulip, not a wide Chardonnay balloon; you want the acid focused.
Food. The bitter phenolic grip plus high acid is a fat-and-salt wine. Cured ham, rillettes, comté and other hard cheeses, roast pork with crackling, or oily fish with beurre blanc. Avoid delicate shellfish and simple green salads - the acid will flatten them and the bitterness will read as a fault.
Price, with the arithmetic
- Bottle cost: $22.
- A 750 mL bottle gives 5 × 150 mL pours (the standard 5 oz glass). Cost per glass = 22 ÷ 5 = $4.40.
- House target pour cost is 25–30%. At 25% the price is 4.40 ÷ 0.25 = $17.60; at 30% it is 4.40 ÷ 0.30 = $14.67.
- List at $17, which lands near 26% and leaves room for a comped taste and a 2–3% spill allowance.
Price it above the Chardonnay by the glass or guests will not try it; price it below the white Burgundy or it will not sell at all. Brief the floor on one sentence: "high acid, textural, bitter finish - it wants fat and salt."