Is Your Wine Dumb, Fat or Flabby?

Dumb, fat and flabby are not very flattering words when applied to people, and they're not so great when describing wine either.
Big red wines like Bordeaux and Cabernet Sauvignon can be wonderful when young and spectacular with many years of aging. But sometimes, in between their youth and senior years, the wines can close up and just not taste very good. Guess what? The wine has gone dumb on you. Sometimes decanting the wine for several hours can bring the wine out of its dumb state, and sometimes ... it doesn't help at all.
Sometimes the wine just needs time - in some cases, lots of time.
When a wine is fat, it will typically be high in alcohol and one dimensional. In other words, the wine will actually feel fat in your mouth without the balance of acid and tannins which give the wine structure.
Where "fat" typically describes a condition of red wine, flabby relates more to whites. The conditions, however, are similar. A flabby white will just taste like grape juice. It will lack the acid that is necessary to provide balance to the fruit. The wine will lack character, will not pair well with food and will be, well, flabby.
That is why the great dessert wines of Sauternes, while extremely sweet, are not flabby at all because of the fruit/acid balance.
Have a great weekend!

Tom