Acid / Acidic / Acidity

(See also: Malic Acid, Tartaric Acid)

The impression of tartness in the mouth is one of the most crucial aspects of the taste of every wine; too much and the wine is sour or hard; too little and it tastes flat or dull. When the acidity is just enough it makes the wine lively, but when it is spot on it can make a dry white wine diamond-bright!

Every year at Gut Hermannsberg the goal is to hit that spot with our Riesling wines. They nearly always have a generous natural acidity that’s a crucial part of their personality, accentuating their minerality. Only two kinds of acid occur naturally in grapes in significant quantities: malic acid is the acidity we are most familiar with from apples and occurs in hundreds of fruits, but tartaric acid is found only in grapes and a handful of other rare fruits. At Gut Hermannsberg the firm tasting tartaric acid forms the backbone of the wine, while the less aggressive malic acid accentuates the impression of crispness.

Some consumers dream of wine without any acidity, thinking this would be the best thing of all, but if you take all the acidity out of wine the result is a soapy taste. Once formed in the grapes tartaric acid is extremely stable, but as the grapes ripen their malic acid content falls considerably. Malic acid can also be transformed into mild tasting lactic acid in the cellar through malolactic fermentation, and both kinds of acid can be chemically removed (deacidification) or added (acidulation).

At Gut Hermannsberg we do none of these things to our wines, because they have a very healthy natural acidity and we want to hang on to it!