Finish

The impression that a wine leaves in your mouth even after you have swallowed it. A finish may be almost nonexistent, fairly short, or extremely long. It may be smooth and lingering, or rough and choppy. A finish may also be dominated by one component in the wine, such as ALCOHOL (a HOT finish), ACID (a tart finish), or TANNIN (an ASTRINGENT finish). A great wine, as opposed to a good wine, always has a pronounced, very long, lingering, well-balanced finish. In some judgings, officials actually measure the length of time that the wine can still be tasted after it has been swallowed.

Who was Gaspard de Stérimberg?

A. Louis Pasteur’s assistant and the man who, historians now believe, was the actual discoverer of the role of yeasts in fermentation (not Pasteur)

B. The French official who established that country’s national Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée laws

C. Louis XIV’s most famous sommelier and a man who was legendary for having a palate memory of every wine he’d ever drunk

D. A Medieval crusader whose shelter became the name of a famous wine

Ok, this quiz was a little obscure, but if you love Rhône wines, you probably got it right. Gaspard de Stérimberg was a medieval crusader who, after being wounded in the Albigensian crusade of 1209 against heretics in southern France, was granted, by Queen Blanche de Castille, the right to establish a sanctuary on top of the hill of Hermitage in the northern Rhône Valley. A small, ancient stone chapel still marks the spot. It is for this chapel that La Chapelle, the impressive top Hermitage wine of Paul Jaboulet Aîné, is named.

“No critic should forget, as he dallies with epithets, sipping his oak-fermented chardonnay or rates one precious bottle half a point behind another, that wine is one of the miracles of nature, and that its 10,000 years of partnership with man has not removed the element of mystery, that independent life that alone among all foods has made men think of it as divine.”

—Hugh Johnson, co-author, The World Atlas of Wine

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