350: Can you really taste “minerality” in wine? Sunny Hodge offers a Cynic's Guide to Wine

Can you really taste “minerality” in wine? What gives Champagne and traditional method wines their signature bready flavor and creamy texture? How has natural wine sparked deeper conversations about how we farm and produce food and drink?

In this episode of the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast, I'm chatting with Sunny Hodge

You can find the wines we discussed at https://www.nataliemaclean.com/winepicks

 

Giveaway

Two of you are going to win a copy of Sunny Hodge’s terrific new book, The Cynic's Guide to Wine. To qualify, all you have to do is email me at [e-mail] and let me know that you’ve posted a review of the podcast. I’ll choose two people randomly from those who contact me. Good luck!

 

Highlights

What is the deeper meaning behind the name of Sunny’s London wine bar, aspen & meursault?

How did Sunny’s early love of rollerskating shape his experiences growing up?

What lessons did Sunny’s mother impart that still impact his worldview today?

How did Sunny’s engineering background influence his approach to learning about wine?

Can we really smell metals and minerals?

Why was Sunny skeptical about the influence of soil on wine?

What surprised Sunny about our technical insights into wine?

How did Sunny find the balance between sharing the complex science behind wine and making it interesting to the average wine lover?

Why does Sunny believe we should be applying cynicism to the world of wine?

How do natural wines cause us to challenge the food and drink we bring to the table?

What does "funky" mean in the context of natural wines?

How does Sunny source unusual wines for his wine bars?

What is humus, and how does it influence wine character?

How do plants absorb nutrients from soil?

 

Key Takeaways

We can smell some geological materials like salt and some minerals, but most minerals and metals we're unable to smell and taste. And those metals that we feel that we can smell and taste, that's actually a tertiary influence of our oils reacting with those metals.Technically, metal and most other minerals except for salt, don't have smell or taste.

Yeast autolysis is the process that gives champagnes and traditional method wines their bready, yeasty, autolytic flavor. Autolysis is when a yeast thinks it's gonna die and it's pretty stressed. So as alcohol levels pick up, and your yeast knows it's going to pass away soon, its enzymes will switch on to a different mode, and this is autolysis mode. They'll start eating away at the cell membrane of the yeast, and eventually they'll make little puncture holes, and all of the insides of the yeast will end up in the liquid. So that self-detonation of yeast in stressful environments is what gives the physical texture to your wine. That's why autolytic wines have that texture and it gives you those yeasty, bready flavors.

Natural wine makes us question how we farm and how we produce all food and drink, not just wine. Wine is one that we can talk about and have a real discourse without it getting too boring. And with natural wine, those bigger topics are, how do we farm? What are the pros and cons of how we farm now, and how are we making our food and drink?

 

About Sunny Hodge

Sunny Hodge is the sole founder of Diogenes the Dog and aspen & meursault; two multi award-winning wine bars associated with challenging the status quo of wine. He is in the process of developing a wine qualification, The Science of Wine Course.

His book “The Cynic’s Guide to Wine” delves into the science behind wine from soil upwards into our perception of taste and flavour to dispel wine myths using science. He is also a member of the Circle of Wine Writers.

He is an International wine judge for IWSC awards, was recently shortlisted for the LWF Buyers Awards 2025 for both ‘On-Trade Multiple Venue Wine Buyer’ and ‘Sustainable Wine Buyer of the Year’.

Hodge is also a commentator and wine writer for the likes of Waitrose Food Magazine, Evening Standard, The Times, The Guardian, Food FM and Monocle Radio and ITV’s Love Your Weekend.

 

 

 

To learn more, visit https://www.nataliemaclean.com/350.