I have to admit, although I’m rather immersed in the culture of wine at this point, when I talk with professional winemakers, I sometimes have to pay really close attention in order to keep up with all the lingo. Most recently, I was at a friend’s party a few weeks ago, and I winemaker I know dismissed one particular Napa cult Cabernet as a 4×4, which prompted me to interject. What exactly did he mean by 4×4? I was racking my brain trying to figure how lumber fit into the whole conversation.
As it turns out, and this is where it gets heady, my friend Kevin was actually referring to wines that have a pH approaching 4.0 and total acidity (TA) approaching 0.4 — which is where I should stop. For those of us who are nerdy enough to care about the winemaking data for our favorite beverages, there is a great website that discusses the relationship between such things as pH, TA, Brix, and malolactic fermentation. The discussion is a bit scientific, but it’s also brief, and very clearly written (the site itself looks as if it hasn’t been redesigned since 1996, though).
But while I don’t care to delve into scientific explanations, I do suggest using the term “4×4″ if you ever feel the need to impress your wine-drinking friends, or even better yet, some snooty adversary at the office. For practical purposes, just think of a 4×4 as something similar to another more popular wine metaphor, the almighty “fruit bomb” (a tired description if there ever was one). So whenever someone says something like, “That so-and-so Cabernet is a bit of a fruit bomb,” you can shake your head, sigh thoughtfully, and reply, “Yep, add another 4×4 to the list.”
