Minerality - What Does it Mean?

'Minerality' is a key contributor to champagne's unmistakable bracing and refreshing style. As a descriptor, it has entered our vocabulary of character assessments tactfully thrown into almost every tasting. But what does it really mean? Wine professional and self-confessed champagne tragic, Matthew Lane, challenges us to open our thoughts to the deeper meaning of champagne's minerality.

In the last five or so years there’s been a targeted effort by champagne purveyors (and Houses alike) to get a hold of opportunities in new export markets. Tastings, a necessary contributor to champagne’s repertoire designed to appeal to curious customers, are increasingly equipping aficionados with a bolder scope of descriptors than previously seen before.

Educational matter, celebrity sommeliers and even social influencers are throwing about words like ‘pet nat’, ‘tannin management’, ‘fruit weight’ and – most often – ‘minerality’ which now infiltrate almost every tasting I go to. Conversely, words like ‘acidification’ and ‘terroir’ are almost obsolete. They say, when you see repetitive motion in life, whether that be words, people, places or things, we become either experts or attuned to it, so why then, are we using a descriptor in tastings so regularly these days, yet no one can merely explain or unscramble it with ease. Minerality, what does it mean?

My wife, Ashley Phillips, who is the Wine Director for the Cohn Restaurant Group in San Diego in California, gave me the best example of this enigmatic descriptor recently when I paused her in a blind tasting and asked “please explain”. Ashley, who is a certified sommelier and champagne zealot, went onto explain how the essence of minerality is a tasting of the soil.

“It reminds me of the wet pebble smell you commonly note with Alsatian Riesling, the lime and lemon acid cut you get in Eden Valley white wines, and the famous chalk sub-soils when tasting great champagne!”

Nodding my head in complete agreement, I couldn’t help but ponder the idea further.

Would ‘minerality’ go on to be used in wine chemistry, wine microbiology or even vineyard management? Or, am I just overthinking it? After all, minerality is just a simple multiplication of the word ‘mineral(s)’ which are essential soil criteria in the world’s best wine-producing regions. And how does it translate to champagne? I’ve pored over years of notes I’ve kept from hundreds of tastings that I have done; and then it appeared. About a decade ago, I was using ‘minerality’ as a descriptor. Blanc de blancs, especially those from grand cru Chouilly, Cramant, Le Mesnil-sur-Oger featured over and over. That Jurassic invertebrate mollusc whose DNA has enriched the sub-soil of Champagne for eons, to which many attribute the architecture of Champagne’s expansive limestone belt is, yes, the pedigree of this very special thing called minerality.

It was there all along. I sighed, closed my books and poured a redeeming glass of 2012 Roland Champion Special Club Blanc de Blancs for confirmation that I was not watching a new age documentary about a sommelier talking about a delicious ‘pet nat’ wine made in a prehistoric vineyard of the Moldovan mountains.

With each sip, and the way it seduced my palate, my saliva glands awoke with insatiable delight. I consolidated my thoughts that minerality does in fact have a place in the lexicon of wine tastings - particularly champagne - when describing soil, texture, tension, a wine’s composition and its palate length. Minerality is alive and well. All I ask, when using this descriptor in the future, is ‘please explain’.

Photography - Tyson Stelzer