I'm going to quibble with the definition of "lack of friction", I don't think that's quite accurate because it's incomplete. "Easy drinking" is more fully about lack of *percieved* extremes, or in other words, balance. High acidity can absolutely be a part of an "easy drinking" wine just like Lemonade can be "easy drinking" but the acidity has to be balanced out by some other attribute, either sugar (in the case of lemonade and/or off dry whites) or reduced alcohol (there's a high acid, 9.5% dry white that drinks like water, compared to most wines.)
Tannins genrally can't be countered, so yes, they have to remain moderate, same as alcohol, which if too high will always = can't drink as much or as fast. But the test is always: is it "dangerous" to drink it while distracted, because then you'd drink too much too quickly.
If "balanced" isn't a backhanded compliment, then neither is "easy drinking". That said, one person's percieved "balanced" may not be another's, and likewise not everyone will agree which wines are "easy drinking" for them, personally. And as palates adapt to what they drink the most, one style might become "easy drinking" that wouldn't be to others (people who love Napa Cabs, for instance.) But as a baseline, the definition is lack of PERCIEVED extremes. Maybe the acidity is technically high, but if it goes down without the drinker fatiguing of it, it's "easy drinking".
Thanks Dave, as always appreciate the thoughts! However I disagree with regard to the equivalence of the term easy drinking and balance. Yes, balance is absolutely a prerequisite for quality, and indeed many easy drinking wines will be well balanced and technically well made. The issue is more one of character and length. The majority of the wines pushed as easy drinking, at least on the London market, tend to be of a style that is frightfully thin, with a short finish that while neither harsh nor off putting, simply goes nowhere. It’s a stylistic fault rather than one of balance, and the result is a weird convergence where any distinction comes down to slight variations in primary aromas rather than texture and complexity. I’m exaggerating, but some do resemble boozy versions of thin cranberry juice and I think it is odd that such wines should be pushed as the starting place for anyone’s wine journey, when seriously good (and by no means hard to drink) wines exist that offer both complexity at an accessible price and hint at the qualities of the seriously good stuff in higher price brackets.
Holidays got me distracted, but I did have an additional thought/rebuttal I wanted to put out there!
I recognize the description of "The majority of the wines pushed as easy drinking, at least on the London market, tend to be of a style that is frightfully thin, with a short finish that while neither harsh nor off putting, simply goes nowhere."
Now whether it's actually a "majority" or not is up for debate and not actually known - the fact that you're sensitive to the presence and marketing of this type of "easy drinking" wine means you're going to notice them and focus on them more than they may actually deserve. But putting that aside, this is an artifically narrow defniition of the sum total of "easy drinking" wines, which then allows you too have a fair criticism, but it's targeting an entire category rather than being clear that it's only the most offfending examples of a category that is broader and contains multitudess.
And this is where I have to keep pushing back: "easy drinking" isn't a single thing anny more than "natural wine" was or "Parkerized wines" or "orange wines", etc. All these categories that became adopted as rising trends, and then pushed back against by the traditionlists/naysayers. "Easy drinking" wines are the new trend in response to the rejection of "Parkerization" which yes, is annoying, because neither category is as straight forward or one thing as we often think of them or write about them. Not all big bold reds were unbalanced or in need of adjustment and not all "delicate and elegant" wines are worth even their lower price of admission. If we want this kind of blind adherence to stylistic trends, we have to stop talking and writing about them as such, or we're just as much of the problem as we're criticising.
We need a healthy amount of ALL these styles, all these wines, for all the many palates and preferences out there. It's can be a helpful thing to question whether so many wines should be "easy drinking" all of a sudden, but by overstating the issue and artificially narrowing the "easy drinking" category to the wines worth criticising is just keeping the trend pendulum swinging in its normal obnoxious way. And it'd be better to write about wine that gives it the complexity and nuance its due, if we want people to treat it that way.
That second paragraph of yours George I zoomed in on as well. There's a lot you pack in there and I've read it a couple times.
"The first sip is agreeable, the second reassuring, and the third much like the first." Without all the technicals, the nuance, the definition of terms, that one quote is what drives the idea of "easy drinking". Because I don't have to think about it too much, like the wine I'm drinking.
Dave's above comment about lemonade is acid/sugar ratio, which requires adjustment and that adjustment depends on the adjuster. Some like it more sweet, a lot more sweet.
Same as iced tea. I can't drink most sweet teas in the South (the southern states here in the US). The tea is too sweet. What is commonplace for a Southerner is unbalanced, not easy to drink, and frankly to my CA adjusted winemaker palate, completely undrinkable. And I happily drink all forms of tea, hot and cold with a touch a sweetener, but not like my friends in the South.
100%. In my wine class, I have all the tasters quickly taste through 3 wines of differing styles and then try to verbalize why they favor whichever style. The high acid and lowest acid wines are the most commonly favored, and the drinkers both claim its because they're "smooth, easy, nothing too harsh" even though the wines are literal polar opposites in terms of acidity and "sweetness". The actual middle of the road wine - the medium acidity, medium sweetness, medium body wine, is historically the most ignored and least favored. even though it's technically the "easy drinking" wine on paper.
That said, a chunk of the class always starts to come around to the medium wine as they class continues, and they realize that while the polar opposite wines stood out initially, that medium wine really is the one they can just keep drinking without fatiguing, while they may not want more than one glass of the extremes. These are all different wines for different moods, they each have their place and purpose, sometimes we want to engage with every sip, and sometimes we just want to enjoy passively. Which is why I can see "Easy drinking" being a better gateway wine for many than anything more complex, challenging, and in that sense, demanding.
I would compare easy drinking wine to easy listening jazz. Neither offends, both may at times entertain. But great wine is not - and should not - be easy. In some instances approachable, but if any wine settles for being easy and approachable, it is unlikely to deliver complexity, length and detail in the way that a great wine can. Easy wines won't develop nuanced aromas and complex flavors as they age. Jazz can be smooth and easy, but the groundbreaking, fence-leaping, earthshaking jazz musicians are able to go well beyond that. Some free jazz will challenge listeners to such a degree that they may exceed an individual's tolerance for listening to experimentation. "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose..." Some wines will do that also - in fact in a recent piece I was challenged to such a degree that I all but gave up on the wines I was reviewing. You've laid out brilliant technical parameters for easy drinking wines. How about a follow-up piece on the technical qualities of great wines that are anything but easy?
I'm with you Paul, great wines that are not easy to figure out and then tried again 3 hours later and then again on Day 2. Easy drinking/Simple wines don't offer much mystery over time.
The French have an expression (as they always seem to) "envie de boire" Which would apparently cover much of the same ground as easy drinking. But is also subtly different.
Quite simply, envie de boire translates as you always want (to drink) more.
Complex, "Grand Vin" can have envie de boire without being easy drinking. They have edges and they're intriguing but you want a second (or third) glass. They are also the opposite of some Parkerised wines which might blow you away when you first taste them but you have zero desire to actually drink them, with or without food.
And they're different again from easy drinking wines when inoffensive gets mistaken for envie de boire.
In my experience one of the most misunderstood aspect of wines is sweetness and dryness. I often hear the term "too dry" from beginners and those with some experience, when in fact they are referring to the wine's acidity. As the article goes into with some detail easy drinking has to mean absence of perceived acidity but the terminology is confusing for beginners.
Nice article. I have a whiskey Substack (Spirited Ideas) and I have been considering an article about what makes whiskey "smooth", the same concept as "easy drinking" wine. "Smooth" whiskies are the big sellers but we enthusiasts prefer some challenge and complexity. I appreciate the technical deep dive.
A couple winemaker items in the easy drinking category as they relate to red wines.
1. Egg white fining in really tannic reds can take the edge off instantly, even a 1/8 of a white in a 225L barrel can have a tremendous impact to the final wine. Pad filtering has a different effect.
2. Less time on the skins during fermentation, using pumpovers, slightly higher fermentation temps (to bring out fruity notes), and lighter pressouts all help with easier drinking
3. For some of my bigger reds, longer barrel aging just mellows out the whole wine, through tannin softening. I did it recently on my Primitivo, over 30 months on neutral, and it is my favorite wine. I just love how soft it is, plenty of texture and nuance, but the aging made it more layered and "easier drinking" than the same wine bottled at 14 months.
4. Adding a little white wine to a red wine. Thank the French for the 2% Viognier trick...just up the percentage to dial in a bit more "softness" to a wine. Doesn't have to be Viognier, but the white wine does matter.
There is great skill and top winemaking in producing a consistent and reliable wine in great quantities.Take Vina Sol which is in its fiftieth plus iteration.It is the epitome of easy drinking but has enough character to keep people coming back for more.There is a great deal of research and work by Torres to get the blend right ,affordable and consistent across the vintages
For me,the most important wine quality is balance.If the wine is well balanced and easy drinking,please fill my glass!
I'm going to quibble with the definition of "lack of friction", I don't think that's quite accurate because it's incomplete. "Easy drinking" is more fully about lack of *percieved* extremes, or in other words, balance. High acidity can absolutely be a part of an "easy drinking" wine just like Lemonade can be "easy drinking" but the acidity has to be balanced out by some other attribute, either sugar (in the case of lemonade and/or off dry whites) or reduced alcohol (there's a high acid, 9.5% dry white that drinks like water, compared to most wines.)
Tannins genrally can't be countered, so yes, they have to remain moderate, same as alcohol, which if too high will always = can't drink as much or as fast. But the test is always: is it "dangerous" to drink it while distracted, because then you'd drink too much too quickly.
If "balanced" isn't a backhanded compliment, then neither is "easy drinking". That said, one person's percieved "balanced" may not be another's, and likewise not everyone will agree which wines are "easy drinking" for them, personally. And as palates adapt to what they drink the most, one style might become "easy drinking" that wouldn't be to others (people who love Napa Cabs, for instance.) But as a baseline, the definition is lack of PERCIEVED extremes. Maybe the acidity is technically high, but if it goes down without the drinker fatiguing of it, it's "easy drinking".
Thanks Dave, as always appreciate the thoughts! However I disagree with regard to the equivalence of the term easy drinking and balance. Yes, balance is absolutely a prerequisite for quality, and indeed many easy drinking wines will be well balanced and technically well made. The issue is more one of character and length. The majority of the wines pushed as easy drinking, at least on the London market, tend to be of a style that is frightfully thin, with a short finish that while neither harsh nor off putting, simply goes nowhere. It’s a stylistic fault rather than one of balance, and the result is a weird convergence where any distinction comes down to slight variations in primary aromas rather than texture and complexity. I’m exaggerating, but some do resemble boozy versions of thin cranberry juice and I think it is odd that such wines should be pushed as the starting place for anyone’s wine journey, when seriously good (and by no means hard to drink) wines exist that offer both complexity at an accessible price and hint at the qualities of the seriously good stuff in higher price brackets.
Holidays got me distracted, but I did have an additional thought/rebuttal I wanted to put out there!
I recognize the description of "The majority of the wines pushed as easy drinking, at least on the London market, tend to be of a style that is frightfully thin, with a short finish that while neither harsh nor off putting, simply goes nowhere."
Now whether it's actually a "majority" or not is up for debate and not actually known - the fact that you're sensitive to the presence and marketing of this type of "easy drinking" wine means you're going to notice them and focus on them more than they may actually deserve. But putting that aside, this is an artifically narrow defniition of the sum total of "easy drinking" wines, which then allows you too have a fair criticism, but it's targeting an entire category rather than being clear that it's only the most offfending examples of a category that is broader and contains multitudess.
And this is where I have to keep pushing back: "easy drinking" isn't a single thing anny more than "natural wine" was or "Parkerized wines" or "orange wines", etc. All these categories that became adopted as rising trends, and then pushed back against by the traditionlists/naysayers. "Easy drinking" wines are the new trend in response to the rejection of "Parkerization" which yes, is annoying, because neither category is as straight forward or one thing as we often think of them or write about them. Not all big bold reds were unbalanced or in need of adjustment and not all "delicate and elegant" wines are worth even their lower price of admission. If we want this kind of blind adherence to stylistic trends, we have to stop talking and writing about them as such, or we're just as much of the problem as we're criticising.
We need a healthy amount of ALL these styles, all these wines, for all the many palates and preferences out there. It's can be a helpful thing to question whether so many wines should be "easy drinking" all of a sudden, but by overstating the issue and artificially narrowing the "easy drinking" category to the wines worth criticising is just keeping the trend pendulum swinging in its normal obnoxious way. And it'd be better to write about wine that gives it the complexity and nuance its due, if we want people to treat it that way.
That second paragraph of yours George I zoomed in on as well. There's a lot you pack in there and I've read it a couple times.
"The first sip is agreeable, the second reassuring, and the third much like the first." Without all the technicals, the nuance, the definition of terms, that one quote is what drives the idea of "easy drinking". Because I don't have to think about it too much, like the wine I'm drinking.
Dave's above comment about lemonade is acid/sugar ratio, which requires adjustment and that adjustment depends on the adjuster. Some like it more sweet, a lot more sweet.
Same as iced tea. I can't drink most sweet teas in the South (the southern states here in the US). The tea is too sweet. What is commonplace for a Southerner is unbalanced, not easy to drink, and frankly to my CA adjusted winemaker palate, completely undrinkable. And I happily drink all forms of tea, hot and cold with a touch a sweetener, but not like my friends in the South.
100%. In my wine class, I have all the tasters quickly taste through 3 wines of differing styles and then try to verbalize why they favor whichever style. The high acid and lowest acid wines are the most commonly favored, and the drinkers both claim its because they're "smooth, easy, nothing too harsh" even though the wines are literal polar opposites in terms of acidity and "sweetness". The actual middle of the road wine - the medium acidity, medium sweetness, medium body wine, is historically the most ignored and least favored. even though it's technically the "easy drinking" wine on paper.
That said, a chunk of the class always starts to come around to the medium wine as they class continues, and they realize that while the polar opposite wines stood out initially, that medium wine really is the one they can just keep drinking without fatiguing, while they may not want more than one glass of the extremes. These are all different wines for different moods, they each have their place and purpose, sometimes we want to engage with every sip, and sometimes we just want to enjoy passively. Which is why I can see "Easy drinking" being a better gateway wine for many than anything more complex, challenging, and in that sense, demanding.
One too many German/Austrian Riesling tastings or Franciacorta tastings, as much as I love both, do a number on the stomach without any food.
I would compare easy drinking wine to easy listening jazz. Neither offends, both may at times entertain. But great wine is not - and should not - be easy. In some instances approachable, but if any wine settles for being easy and approachable, it is unlikely to deliver complexity, length and detail in the way that a great wine can. Easy wines won't develop nuanced aromas and complex flavors as they age. Jazz can be smooth and easy, but the groundbreaking, fence-leaping, earthshaking jazz musicians are able to go well beyond that. Some free jazz will challenge listeners to such a degree that they may exceed an individual's tolerance for listening to experimentation. "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose..." Some wines will do that also - in fact in a recent piece I was challenged to such a degree that I all but gave up on the wines I was reviewing. You've laid out brilliant technical parameters for easy drinking wines. How about a follow-up piece on the technical qualities of great wines that are anything but easy?
I'm with you Paul, great wines that are not easy to figure out and then tried again 3 hours later and then again on Day 2. Easy drinking/Simple wines don't offer much mystery over time.
The French have an expression (as they always seem to) "envie de boire" Which would apparently cover much of the same ground as easy drinking. But is also subtly different.
Quite simply, envie de boire translates as you always want (to drink) more.
Complex, "Grand Vin" can have envie de boire without being easy drinking. They have edges and they're intriguing but you want a second (or third) glass. They are also the opposite of some Parkerised wines which might blow you away when you first taste them but you have zero desire to actually drink them, with or without food.
And they're different again from easy drinking wines when inoffensive gets mistaken for envie de boire.
As usual thought provoking (see other comments) and some science too.
In my experience one of the most misunderstood aspect of wines is sweetness and dryness. I often hear the term "too dry" from beginners and those with some experience, when in fact they are referring to the wine's acidity. As the article goes into with some detail easy drinking has to mean absence of perceived acidity but the terminology is confusing for beginners.
Nice article. I have a whiskey Substack (Spirited Ideas) and I have been considering an article about what makes whiskey "smooth", the same concept as "easy drinking" wine. "Smooth" whiskies are the big sellers but we enthusiasts prefer some challenge and complexity. I appreciate the technical deep dive.
A couple winemaker items in the easy drinking category as they relate to red wines.
1. Egg white fining in really tannic reds can take the edge off instantly, even a 1/8 of a white in a 225L barrel can have a tremendous impact to the final wine. Pad filtering has a different effect.
2. Less time on the skins during fermentation, using pumpovers, slightly higher fermentation temps (to bring out fruity notes), and lighter pressouts all help with easier drinking
3. For some of my bigger reds, longer barrel aging just mellows out the whole wine, through tannin softening. I did it recently on my Primitivo, over 30 months on neutral, and it is my favorite wine. I just love how soft it is, plenty of texture and nuance, but the aging made it more layered and "easier drinking" than the same wine bottled at 14 months.
4. Adding a little white wine to a red wine. Thank the French for the 2% Viognier trick...just up the percentage to dial in a bit more "softness" to a wine. Doesn't have to be Viognier, but the white wine does matter.
There is great skill and top winemaking in producing a consistent and reliable wine in great quantities.Take Vina Sol which is in its fiftieth plus iteration.It is the epitome of easy drinking but has enough character to keep people coming back for more.There is a great deal of research and work by Torres to get the blend right ,affordable and consistent across the vintages
For me,the most important wine quality is balance.If the wine is well balanced and easy drinking,please fill my glass!