Yeah, But Does It Have Good Bones?

July 30th, 2023

When I find myself in a doctor’s waiting room, donating blood, or some other neutral space of polite company it always seems that the TVs are tuned to some sort of home renovation show. You know, the politically neutral type containing couples that smile too much to be trusted, men who seem to have a perpetually perfect five o’clock shadow, and parents who have patience for their children (which can’t be real). These people, or the people that they’re finding, building, selling, buying, or renovating a house for will wander around these houses and fawn over this feature or that, or complain about the most bizarre minutiae, and at some point one of them will comment about the house having “good bones.”

I understand what they’re saying, but I don’t really know what they’re saying. As someone who is, at best, capable of changing a lightbulb I don’t know what I would be looking for to make sure that a house has a good bone or two, but I do know that it means the structure of the house is sound. This is what came to mind when a longtime friend of the store, some call him Christopher, asked me to clarify what I meant when I used the word “structured” to describe a wine..

I may have at some point already touched on jargon in wine, and if I haven’t I promise I will since it’s a source of never ending confusion for all parties involved, but structure is usually used as a positive when describing wine. Spend enough time reading about different wines and you’ll notice little linguistic curiosities.

The same light bodied wine could be described by one person as “thin” negatively, or as “elegant” or “fresh” positively. Two people tasting the same wine, but having different opinions about whether the acid level is appropriate, would describe it differently. In wine speak nobody would refer to a wine as “acidic” as a positive. To compliment a wine one would say that it has good acid.

As for the word “structure,” I’ve almost only seen it used in positive reviews or descriptions about wine. Though I’ve used structure as a descriptor in reference to all sorts of wine, I find myself most often using them in the context of red wines regarding how tannins balance in the wine with the other elements.

A wine with no tannin and a ton of fruit can seem flabby and one dimensional. A lot of tannin and no fruit can come across as austere or astringent. And of course not all tannins are created equal. Tannins from grape skins are different from those in wooden barrels which are different from those in grape stems, and of course the question of tannin from stems depends on the ripeness of the stems.

Not to over complicate things of course.
However when the tannins are managed well by the winemaker, and they’re in balance with the fruit, it’s like all of the instruments coming together in a symphony. It’s in this situation that I would refer to a wine as being structured. The funny thing is that structure also implies to me that the wine will stand the test of time, like a well built house I suppose. So it isn’t just that a wine is in balance, but as another linguistic curiosity, that a wine is ageworthy without necessarily saying that it’s ageworthy.

Though I won’t go into in such great depth, a similar phenomenon occurs with white wines when the wine has good acid (note the callback), and shows the elements of weight, acid, fruit, savory qualities, and overall balance to be able to age for a number of years.

The caveat here, and there are A LOT of caveats when it comes to wine, is that the way I define structure in wine may be different from how someone else uses the term. So next time that you’re trying a wine, think about whether it’s a house that will last a hundred years, or a cheap, slapped together structure that starts falling apart a month after it’s built.

– Joe Buchter, Import Wine Buyer

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