Cloves Spice -
Aromas and Flavors of Wine

Cloves are very commonly used in cooking, especially in holiday celebrations. Cloves have been used in China for over 2000 years! Did you know that cloves come from a "clove tree" and the little black objects are the buds of the tree, all dried up?

You should easily be able to find cloves in the spice section of any grocery store.

The Wines with Clove Flavor

The clove flavor in wine is often associated with Rioja, a red, spicy wine from Spain. This wine is great with BBQ steaks and other strong flavored meats.

Another wine that has flavors of clove in it is Gewurztraminer, a white wine that traditionally comes from Germany. The gewurztraminer grape is now also being grown in California and Australia. These wines tend to be on the sweet side.

Clove is also a flavor that is brought on by a certain technique in winemaking. Winemakers often put wine into barrels after the wine is made, so the wine can absorb flavors from those barrels as they age. The barrels are "toasted" on the inside to a certain level of toastiness. The level of toast affects the kinds of flavors that the wine takes on. The more toasty, the stronger the flavor that the wine picks up. Most people associate vanilla as a flavor that oak-aging gives to a wine, but cloves is another flavor that a wine aged in toasted oak will pick up.

Since the clove flavor goes so well with wine, there are even two types of wine that cloves are physically added in to the wine. One is Mead, the honey wine that has been enjoyed for centuries. A mead that has cloves added is called Metheglin. The other wine type is Mulled Wine, which is a wine-spice mixture that is served warm in the winter.

All About the Flavors of Wine