Tension

Last week on the Karen MacNeil Facebook page, Edward S asked what is meant by “tension” in a wine. Here goes: tension is the sense in a wine that there are two opposing forces that create a kind of dynamic energy. For example, when those entities are fruit and acid, you might have a wine that walks a tightrope between richness (fruit) and freshness (acid). Tension can give wine a kind of “aliveness”.