Uh oh!

We're gonna have a disagreement here! There is no true definition for mineraly in white. To me it's a combination of high acid and almost salty. I do get the flavors of minerals sometimes in wines. At the extreme it can make the wine taste like aspirin or vitamins. At it's best it tastes like limestone, or chalk, granite or slate. Elements of the great vineyards that we tend to see, perhaps against reason, in the their wines.

I'm comfortably stating that that is what it typycally means but other do and will disagree.

dmker - I can't even guess as to what or whom he's alluding . . .

But let's think about it for a second. Calcium chloride. It dissolves. The ions get carried up into the grape. So the wine tastes like calcium chloride? In other words it tastes like salt? Or does it taste like elemental calcium and/or chloride? I would suggest neither.

Minerals are usually described as inorganic solids with a regular crystaline structure. Quartz for example. So if something has "minerality", it should conceivably taste like the minerals that were in the soil, no? Feldspar for example, would be found in slate soils. That's got aluminum and silica and some other stuff. Limestone would be calcium carbonate. Red soil would likely have iron oxides.

So which exact mineral are we tasting? Sulfates, chromates, halides? We certainly wouldn't taste the same "minerality" in a wine from slate as we would in a wine from limestone, would we? Can anyone distinguish the various "mineralities" they taste?

We see red soil, we think iron, and we decide we're tasting it in the wine. Only the iron in the soil may well be ferric iron and not ferrous. It's not necessarily going to find its way into the plant. In fact, your plant may suffer from serious iron deficiency even if you bury hundreds of iron pots and nails around it.

Gout de terroir is a nice romantic phrase that is essentially a load of crap in my opinion. For example, the chalk in your Chablis is exactly the limestone in your sauvignon blanc. Chalk is limestone is calcium carbonate.

Grapes actually have very low nutritional requirements, which is one reason they grow on land that's basically scrubland or desert. There is every bit as much "minerality" in the soils of Sonoma or Mendoza or Clare Valley as there is in Chablis. If minerality really referred to the taste of the actual minerals, you would notice it in virtually every wine. But that's not what people are experiencing. Look at the wines where you yourself find it. I think what they're "tasting" is usually acidity. And remember that lactic acid is much nicer and softer on our palates than say, malic or acetic acid or even citric acid. So depending on the absolute level of acidity, and the relative types of acidity, we experience something that we call "minerality".

I'm certain that people are actually experiencing something. I've picked it up myself. But I'm equally sure that it's got nothing at all to do with ionic bonds that have broken and with dissolved salts.

Try this one, it has lots of minerals: Michel Delhommeau Harmonie 2007. Oh yeah, welcome to Snooth!

Thanks for the responses. This is an interesting discussion.

Short but fairly interesting article on the subject. Touches briefly on acidity relationship to minerality:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3488/is_12_87/ai_n17093915/