When you're trying to identify the fruit characteristics in a red wine, I find it helpful to first try to decide if it's a red fruit or a black fruit. You can see examples of these on the aroma and flavor cards I've designed. Taking a look at the card, you can see that red fruits include things like raspberries and red cherries, while black fruits include blackberries and black cherries. For this lesson, the wine I've chosen to illustrate fruit qualities is the Arboretto Montepulciano d'Abruzzo (which you can order from Frankly Wines). I picked this wine because it is a very simple, but good example of a fruity wine. It doesn't have very much earth or spice, but it does have plenty of fruit.
So what do you think? What kind of fruit do you taste in this wine? It can be fun to taste and smell a wine for a long time and debate with your friends if it's blackberries or if it's red cherries. But the important thing for you to get from this wine is that it is is predominantly fruit driven. The primary fruit quality I get from this wine is a sour red cherry, which is a very typical fruit quality to find in an Italian wine.
Do you like this wine? If you do, you could be lucky, as wines that are simple and fruity tend to be fairly inexpensive. A wine like this is a perfect pair with a tomato based pasta sauce. If you don't like it by itself, you may find that it comes into its own when paired with the right food. If you like this wine, you should try Shiraz from Australia, or just ask the salesperson at your local wine store for a nice fruity wine.
It should be noted that this wine is not sweet at all. In other words, there is no sugar in this wine. When a wine has no sugar in it, we refer to it as dry. There's no good reason for why we call it that, and it causes lots of confusion, but that is just the way it is. While this wine isn't sweet, it is very fruity. A lot of people come into the wine store asking for something sweet, and it's hard for us to tell what they mean. Most red wines are not sweet, but plenty of them are fruity. So now you're armed with the right vocabulary to get what you want the next time you ask a store clerk for help.
