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Таких посланий она получила больше двух десятков. И все был подписаны одинаково: «Любовь без воска». Она просила его открыть скрытый смысл этих слов, но Дэвид отказывался и только улыбался: «Из нас двоих ты криптограф».

Главный криптограф АНБ испробовала все – подмену букв, шифровальные квадраты, даже анаграммы. Она пропустила эти слова через компьютер и поставила перед ним задачу переставить буквы в новую фразу.

The wisdom of the ages dictates that the grapevine must struggle to produce the best grapes, and well-drained, less fertile soils challenge the vine to struggle, regardless of what variety the grapevine is. Has the Brave New World of grape growing arrived? Not really. In botanical terms, a clone is a subdivision of a variety. Within a single variety, such as Chardonnay, differences can exist from one plant to the next. Some vines might ripen their fruit slightly more quickly, for example, or produce grapes with slightly different aromas and flavors than the next vine.

The new plants are genetically identical to the mother plant. Increasingly, growers plant their vineyards with several different clones to foster complexity. Nurseries propagate grapevines asexually, by taking cuttings from a mother plant and allowing A Primer on White Grape Varieties This section includes descriptions of the 12 most important white vinifera varieties today. In describing the grapes, naturally we describe the types of wine that are made from each grape. These grapes can also be blending partners for other grapes, in wines made from multiple grape varieties.

Turn to Chapter 2 for a quick review of some of the descriptors we use in this section. Chardonnay Chardonnay is a regal grape for its role in producing the greatest dry white wines in the world — white Burgundies — and for being one of the main grapes of Champagne. Today it also ends up in a huge amount of everyday wine. Chapter 3: Pinot Envy and Other Secrets about Grape Varieties Because the flavors of Chardonnay are very compatible with those of oak — and because white Burgundy the great prototype is generally an oaked wine, and because many wine drinkers love the flavor of oak — most Chardonnay wine receives some oak treatment either during or after fermentation.

Oaked Chardonnay is so common that some wine drinkers confuse the flavor of oak with the flavor of Chardonnay. Chardonnay itself has fruity aromas and flavors that range from apple — in cooler wine regions — to tropical fruits, especially pineapple, in warmer regions.

Chardonnay also can display subtle earthy aromas, such as mushroom or minerals. Chardonnay wine has medium to high acidity and is generally full-bodied. Classically, Chardonnay wines are dry. But most inexpensive Chardonnays these days are actually a bit sweet. Chardonnay is a grape that can stand on its own in a wine, and the top Chardonnay-based wines except for Champagne and similar bubblies are percent Chardonnay.

Riesling wines are far less popular today than Chardonnay. While Chardonnay is usually gussied up with oak, Riesling almost never is; while Chardonnay can be full-bodied and rich, Riesling is more often light-bodied, crisp, and refreshing.

In California, for example, some of the so-called Pinot Blanc has turned out to be another grape entirely: Melon de Bourgogne. Knopf , an indispensable and fascinating reference. Alsace Rieslings are normally dry, many German Rieslings are fairly dry, and a few American Rieslings are dry. Riesling can be vinified either way, according to the style of wine a producer wants to make. Look for the word trocken meaning dry on German Riesling labels and the word dry on American labels if you prefer the dry style of Riesling.

Riesling wines are sometimes labeled as White Riesling or Johannisberg Riesling — both synonyms for the noble Riesling grape. With wines from Eastern European countries, though, read the fine print: Olazrizling, Laskirizling, and Welschriesling are from another grape altogether. If you consider yourself a maverick who hates to follow trends, check out the Riesling section of your wine shop instead of the Chardonnay aisle.

Sauvignon Blanc Sauvignon Blanc is a white variety with a very distinctive character. Besides herbaceous character sometimes referred to as grassy , Sauvignon Blanc wines display mineral aromas and flavors, vegetal character, or — in certain climates — fruity character, such as ripe melon, figs, or passion fruit.

The wines are light- to medium-bodied and usually dry. Most of them are unoaked, but some are oaky. Pinot Gris is believed to have mutated from the black Pinot Noir grape. Pinot Gris wines are medium- to full-bodied, usually not oaky, and have rather low acidity and fairly neutral aromas. Sometimes the flavor and aroma can suggest the skins of fruit, such as peach skins or orange rind. The only region in France where Pinot Gris is important is in Alsace, where it really struts its stuff.

Oregon has had good success with Pinot Gris, and more and more winemakers in California are now taking a shot at it. It makes mediumbodied, crisp, appley-tasting, usually unoaked white wines whose high glycerin gives them silky texture. The best wines have high acidity and a fascinating oily texture they feel rather viscous in your mouth. Some good dry Chenin Blanc comes from California, but so does a ton of ordinary off-dry wine.

A commercial style of U. Extremely pretty floral aromas. In Alsace and Austria, makes a dry wine, and in lots of places southern France, southern Italy, Australia makes a delicious, sweet dessert wine through the addition of alcohol. Pinot Blanc Fairly neutral in aroma and flavors, yet can make characterful wines. High acidity and low sugar levels translate into dry, crisp, medium-bodied wines. Alsace, Austria, northern Italy, and Germany are the main production zones.

A major grape in Australia, and southwestern France, including Bordeaux where it is the key player in the dessert wine, Sauternes. Floral aroma, delicately apricot-like, medium- to full-bodied with low acidity. See Chapter 4 for a chart listing the grape varieties of major place-name wines. The Cabernet Sauvignon grape makes wines that are high in tannin and are medium- to full-bodied. Cabernet Sauvignon wines come in all price and quality levels.

The leastexpensive versions are usually fairly soft and very fruity, with medium body. The best wines are rich and firm with great depth and classic Cabernet flavor. Serious Cabernet Sauvignons can age for 15 years or more. Because Cabernet Sauvignon is fairly tannic and because of the blending precedent in Bordeaux , winemakers often blend it with other grapes; usually Merlot — being less tannic — is considered an ideal partner.

Australian winemakers have an unusual practice of blending Cabernet Sauvignon with Syrah. More on that in Chapter Merlot Deep color, full body, high alcohol, and low tannin are the characteristics of wines made from the Merlot grape. The aromas and flavors can be plummy or sometimes chocolatey, or they can suggest tea leaves.

Merlot makes both inexpensive, simple wines and, when grown in the right conditions, very serious wines. But a great Pinot Noir can be one of the greatest wines ever. The prototype for Pinot Noir wine is red Burgundy, from France, where tiny vineyard plots yield rare treasures of wine made entirely from Pinot Noir. Pinot Noir wine is lighter in color than Cabernet or Merlot. It has relatively high alcohol, medium-to-high acidity, and medium-to-low tannin although oak barrels can contribute additional tannin to the wine.

Pinot Noir is rarely blended with other grapes. Turn to Chapter 12 for more on Shiraz. Chapter 3: Pinot Envy and Other Secrets about Grape Varieties Zinfandel White Zinfandel is such a popular wine — and so much better known than the red style of Zinfandel — that its fans might argue that Zinfandel is a white grape. Zinfandel is one of the oldest grapes in California, and it therefore enjoys a certain stature there.

Its aura is enhanced by its mysterious history: Although Zinfandel is clearly a vinifera grape, for decades authorities were uncertain of its origins. Zin — as lovers of red Zinfandel call it — makes rich, dark wines that are high in alcohol and medium to high in tannin. They can have a blackberry or raspberry aroma and flavor, a spicy or tarry character, or even a jammy flavor.

You can tell which is which by the price. But the extraordinary quality of Barolo and Barbaresco, two Piedmont wines, prove what greatness it can achieve under the right conditions.

The Nebbiolo grape is high in both tannin and acid, which can make a wine tough. Fortunately, it also gives enough alcohol to soften the package. Its color can be deep when the wine is young but can develop orangey tinges within a few years. Its complex aroma is fruity strawberry, cherry , earthy and woodsy tar, truffles , herbal mint, eucalyptus, anise , and floral roses.

Sangiovese This Italian grape has proven itself in the Tuscany region of Italy, especially in the Brunello di Montalcino and Chianti districts. Sangiovese makes wines that are medium to high in acidity and firm in tannin; the wines can be lightbodied to full-bodied, depending on exactly where the grapes grow and how the wine is made. The aromas and flavors of the wines are fruity — especially cherry, often tart cherry — with floral nuances of violets and sometimes a slightly nutty character.

It gives wines deep color, low acidity, and only moderate alcohol. Modern renditions of Tempranillo from the Ribera del Duero region and elsewhere in Spain prove what color and fruitiness this grape has. Other red grapes Table describes additional red grape varieties and their wines, which you can encounter either as varietal wines or as wines named for their place of production. Barbera Italian variety that, oddly for a red grape, has little tannin but very high acidity.

When fully ripe, it can give big, fruity wines with refreshing crispness. Many producers age the wine in new oak to increase the tannin level of their wine.

Cabernet Franc A parent of Cabernet Sauvignon, and often blended with it to make Bordeaux-style wines. Ripens earlier, and has more expressive, fruitier flavor especially berries , as well as less tannin. A specialty of the Loire Valley in France, where it makes wines with place-names such as Chinon and Bourgeuil. Gamay Excels in the Beaujolais district of France.

It makes grapey wines that can be low in tannin — although the grape itself is fairly tannic. Grenache A Spanish grape by origin, called Garnacha there. Sometimes Grenache makes pale, high-alcohol wines that are dilute in flavor. In the right circumstances, it can make deeply colored wines with velvety texture and fruity aromas and flavors suggestive of raspberries.

Never before have we seen such an astounding proliferation of wine labels! Since about , it seems that new brands of wine have appeared out of the blue every week. One sure way to become more comfortable when confronted by shelf upon shelf of unfamiliar wine labels is to learn how to decode the information on those labels.

The Wine Name Game All sorts of names appear on wine labels. Is it a grape? Most of the wines that you find in your wine shop or on restaurant wine lists are named in one of two basic ways: either for their grape variety or for the place where the grapes grew. That information, plus the name of the producer, becomes the shorthand name we use in talking about the wine. Fontodi Chianti Classico is a wine made by the Fontodi winery and named after the place called Chianti Classico.

That information is the kind of thing you can look up. Chapters 9 through 15 will help. Hello, my name is Chardonnay A varietal wine is a wine that is named after either the principal or the sole grape variety that makes up the wine. Each country and in the United States, some individual states has laws that dictate the minimum percentage of the named grape that a wine must contain if that wine wants to call itself by a grape name. The issue is truth in advertising.

In Oregon, the minimum is 90 percent except for Cabernet, which can be 75 percent. And in the countries that form the European Union EU , the minimum is 85 percent. Some varietal wines are made entirely from the grape variety for which the wine is named. All you know is that the wine contains at least the minimum legal percentage of the named variety.

Why name a wine after a grape variety? Grapes are the raw material of a wine. Except for whatever a wine absorbs from oak barrels certain aromas and flavors, as well as tannin and from certain winemaking processes described in Chapter 5, the juice of the grapes is what any wine is.

So to name a wine after its grape variety is very logical. Naming a wine for its grape variety is also very satisfying to exacting consumers. Knowing what grape a wine is made from is akin to knowing what type of oil is in the salad dressing, whether there are any trans-fats in your bread, and how much egg is in your egg roll.

Most California and other American wines carry varietal names. Likewise, most Australian, South American, and South African wines are named by using the principal principle. Varietal currency A common perception among some wine drinkers is that a varietal wine is somehow better than a non-varietal wine.

Actually, the fact that a wine is named after its principal grape variety is absolutely no indication of quality. Hello, my name is Bordeaux Unlike American wines, most European wines are named for the region where their grapes grow rather than for the grape variety itself. Instead, the labels say Burgundy, Bordeaux, Sancerre, and so on: the place where those grapes grow.

Au contraire! The only catch is that to harvest this information, you have to learn something about the different regions from which the wines come. Turn to Chapters 9 through 15 for some of that information. Why name a wine after a place? Grapes, the raw material of wine, have to grow somewhere.

Depending on the type of soil, the amount of sunshine, the amount of rain, the slope of the hill, and the many other characteristics that each somewhere has, the grapes will turn out differently. If the grapes are different, the wine is different. Each wine, therefore, reflects the place where its grapes grow. Therefore, the name of a place where grapes are grown in Europe automatically connotes the grape or grapes used to make the wine of that place.

Which brings us back to our original question: Is this some kind of nefarious plot to make wine incomprehensible to non-Europeans? The terroir game Terroir pronounced ter wahr is a French word that has no direct translation in English, so wine people just use the French word, for expediency not for snobbery.

Terroir is the combination of immutable natural factors — such as topsoil, subsoil, climate sun, rain, wind, and so on , the slope of the hill, and altitude — that a particular vineyard site has. Chances are that no two vineyards in the entire world have precisely the same combination of these factors.

So we consider terroir to be the unique combination of natural factors that a particular vineyard site has. The thinking goes like this: The name of the place connotes which grapes were used to make the wine of that place because the grapes are dictated by regulations , and the place influences the character of those grapes in its own unique way. Therefore, the most accurate name that a wine can have is the name of the place where its grapes grew.

Place-names on American wine labels France may have invented the concept that wines should be named after their place of origin, but neither France nor even greater Europe has a monopoly on the idea. Wine labels from non-European countries also tell you where a wine comes from — usually by featuring the name of a place somewhere on the label. But a few differences exist between the European and non-European systems.

First of all, on an American wine label or an Australian, Chilean or South African label, for that matter you have to go to some effort to find the place-name on the label. The place of origin is not the fundamental name of the wine as it is for most European wines ; the grape usually is. Second, place-names in the United States mean far less than they do in Europe.

But legally, the name Napa Valley means only that at least 85 percent of the grapes came from an area defined by law as the Napa Valley wine zone. The name Napa Valley does not define the type of wine, nor does it imply specific grape varieties, the way a European place-name does. Good thing the grape name is there, as big as day, on the label. Place-names on labels of non-European wines, for the most part, merely pay lip service to the concept of terroir. In fact, some non-European wine origins are ridiculously broad.

This label says that this wine comes from a specific area that is 30 percent larger than the entire country of Italy! Some specific area! Italy has more than specific wine zones. Chapter 4: Wine Names and Label Lingo When the place on the label is merely California, in fact, that information tells you next to nothing about where the grapes grew.

Same thing for all those Australian wines labeled South Eastern Australia — an area only slightly smaller than France and Spain combined. Wines named in other ways Now and then, you may come across a wine that is named for neither its grape variety nor its region of origin. Such wines usually fall into three categories: branded wines, wines with proprietary names, or generic wines. Branded wines Most wines have brand names, including those wines that are named after their grape variety — like Cakebread brand name Sauvignon Blanc grape — and those that are named after their region of origin — like Masi brand name Valpolicella place.

Wines that have only a brand name on them, with no indication of grape or of place — other than the country of production — are generally the most inexpensive, ordinary wines you can get.

Certain words used to describe wine zones suggest the relative size of the place. In descending order of size and ascending order of specificity: country, region, district, subdistrict, commune, vineyard. In France, some producers have deliberately added the grape name to their labels even though the grape is already implicit in the wine name. And German wines usually carry grape names along with their official place-names.

Wines with proprietary names You can find some pretty creative names on wine bottles these days: Tapestry, Conundrum, Insignia, Isosceles, Mythology, Trilogy. Is this stuff to drink, to drive, or to dab behind your ears? Names like these are proprietary names often trademarked that producers create for special wines.

In the case of American wines, the bottles with proprietary names usually contain wines made from a blend of grapes; therefore, no one grape name can be used as the name of the wine. In the case of European wines, the grapes used to make the wine were probably not the approved grapes for that region; therefore, the regional name could not be used on the label. Although a brand name can apply to several different wines, a proprietary name usually applies to one specific wine.

But the proprietary name Luce applies to a single wine. Chapter 4: Wine Names and Label Lingo Generic wines A generic name is a wine name that has been used inappropriately for so long that it has lost its original meaning in the eyes of the government exactly what Xerox, Kleenex, and Band-Aid are afraid of becoming.

Burgundy, Chianti, Chablis, Champagne, Rhine wine, Sherry, Port, and Sauterne are all names that rightfully should apply only to wines made in those specific places. After years of negotiation with the European Union, the U. However, any wine that bore such a name prior to March may continue to carry that name.

In time, generic names will become less common on wine labels. Wine Labels, Forward and Backward Many wine bottles have two labels. So sometimes producers put all that information on the smaller of two labels and call that one the front label. Then the producers place a larger, colorful, dramatically eye-catching label — with little more than the name of the wine on it — on the back of the bottle. Guess which way the back label ends up facing when the bottle is placed on the shelf?

Although U. Of the various phrases that may be used to identify the bottler on labels of wine sold in the United States, only the words produced by or made by indicate the name of the company that actually fermented 75 percent or more of the wine that is, who really made the wine ; words such as cellared by or vinted by mean only that the company subjected the wine to cellar treatment holding it for a while, for example.

The European mandate Some of the mandatory information on American and Canadian wine labels is also required by the EU authorities for wines produced or sold in the European Union. But the EU regulations require additional label items for wines produced in its member countries. This is a distinctly different use of the term table wine. Appellations of origin A registered place-name is called an appellation of origin.

For European table wines — wines without an official appellation of origin — each European country has two phrases. One term applies to table wines with a geographic indication actually Italy has two phrases in this category , and another denotes table wines with no geographic indication smaller than the country of production.

Figure The label of a European wine to be sold in the United States. But the phrase does not appear on wine labels refer to Figure Nor does any such phrase appear on labels of Australian or South American wines. Some optional label lingo Besides the mandatory information required by government authorities, all sorts of other words can appear on wine labels. Sometimes the same word can fall into either category, depending on the label.

This ambiguity occurs because some words that are strictly regulated in some producing countries are not at all regulated in others. Chapter 4: Wine Names and Label Lingo The EU hierarchy of wine Although each country within the European Union makes its own laws regarding the naming of wine, these laws must fit within the framework of the European Union law.

Each appellation regulation defines the geographic area, the grapes that may be used, grape-growing practices, winemaking and aging techniques, and so on.

The table wine category has two subcategories: Table wines that carry a precise geographic indication on their labels, such as French vin de pays or Spanish vino de la tierra wines; and table wines with no geographic indication except the country of origin. These latter wines may not carry a vintage or a grape name.

If a wine has a geographic indication smaller than the country of origin, it enjoys higher status than otherwise. Vintage The word vintage followed by a year, or the year listed alone without the word vintage, is the most common optional item on a wine label refer to Figure Sometimes the vintage appears on the front label, and sometimes it has its own small label above the front label.

The vintage year is nothing more than the year in which the grapes for a particular wine grew; the wine must have 75 to percent of the grapes of this year, depending on the country of origin.

Nonvintage wines are blends of wines whose grapes were harvested in different years. But there is an aura surrounding vintage-dated wine that causes many people to believe that any wine with a vintage date is by definition better than a wine without a vintage date. Reserve Reserve is our favorite meaningless word on American wine labels. The term is used to convince you that the wine inside the bottle is special. Implicit in the extra aging is the idea that the wine was better than normal and, therefore, worthy of the extra aging.

Spain even has degrees of reserve, such as Gran Reserva. But these days, the word is bandied about so much that it no longer has meaning. Estate-bottled Estate is a genteel word for a wine farm, a combined grape-growing and winemaking operation. The words estate-bottled on a wine label indicate that the company that bottled the wine also grew the grapes and made the wine. In other words, estate-bottled suggests accountability from the vineyard to the winemaking through to the bottling.

In many countries, the winery does not necessarily have to own the vineyards, but it has to control the vineyards and perform the vineyard operations. Ravenswood Winery — to name just one example — makes some terrific wines from the grapes of small vineyards owned and operated by private landowners.

And some large California landowners, such as the Sangiacomo family, are quite serious about their vineyards but do not make wine themselves; they sell their grapes to various wineries. None of those wines would be considered estate-bottled.

Sometimes one winery will make two or three different wines that are distinguishable only by the vineyard name on the label. Each wine is unique because the terroir of each vineyard is unique. These single vineyards may or may not be identified by the word vineyard next to the name of the vineyard.

Italian wines, which are really into the single-vineyard game, will have vigneto or vigna on their labels next to the name of the single vineyard. One additional expression on some French labels is Vieilles Vignes vee yay veen , which translates as old vines, and appears as such on some Californian and Australian labels. Because old vines produce a very small quantity of fruit compared to younger vines, the quality of their grapes and of the resulting wine is considered to be very good.

The problem is, the phrase is unregulated. Anyone can claim that his vines are old. It means the wine attained a higher alcohol level than a nonsuperior version of the same wine would have. But to find it, you have to fight your way through a jungle of jargon. You encounter it on the back labels of wine bottles, in the words the sales clerk uses to explain his recommendations, and on the signs all around the wine shop. Why on earth is everyone making wine so complicated?

Some wine is just a beverage, and it should taste good — period. Other wine is an art form that fascinates and intrigues people. Many people who make and sell wine want you to think that their wines are in the second category, because such wines are more prestigious. Complicated technical language is supposed to make you think that a wine is special, more than just a beverage.

How much of this information if any is pivotal in helping you get the kind of wine you want, and how much is pretentious technobabble?

Read on. Grapegrowing, Winemaking, and the Jargon that Surrounds Them Winemakers use numerous techniques to make wine. Any technique can be right or wrong depending on the grapes and the type of wine being made — that is, the price level, the taste profile the winemaker is seeking, and the type of wine drinker the winery is targeting. The taste of the wine involves not just its flavors, but its aroma, body, texture, length, and so on see Chapter 2.

And the taste of a wine is a subjective experience. Every winemaking technique does affect the taste of the wine in one way or another, however. Most of the technical words that are bandied about in wine circles represent procedures that are relevant to the taste of a wine. Viti-vini Producing wine actually involves two separate steps: the growing of the grapes, called viticulture, and the making of the wine, called vinification.

In some wine courses, students nickname the dual process viti-vini. Sometimes one company performs both steps, as is the case with estate-bottled wines see Chapter 4. And sometimes the two steps are completely separate. For example, some large wineries buy grapes from private grape growers. In the case of the very least expensive wines, the winery named on the label may have purchased not even grapes but wine from bulk wine producers , and then blended the wines and bottled the final product as his own.

As we mention in Chapter 4, only the terms produced by or made by on the label assure you that the company named on the label actually vinified most of that wine. Chapter 5: Behind the Scenes of Winemaking Vine-growing variations Growing grapes for wine is a fairly intricate process that viticulturalists are constantly refining to suit their particular soil, climate, and grape varieties. Many of the technical terms spill over into discussions about wine, or crop up on wine labels. But individual locations within a region — the southfacing side of a particular hill, for example — can have a climatic reality that is different from neighboring vineyards.

The unique climatic reality of a specific location is usually called its microclimate. Technically, the correct term for what we have just described is mesoclimate, but microclimate is a more common term on back labels and in colloquial usage.

Commercial viticulture involves attaching the shoots of vines to wires or trellises in a systematic pattern. The purpose of training the vine — as this activity is called — is to position the grape bunches so that they get enough sun to ripen well and so that the fruit is easy for the harvesters to reach. An open canopy is a trellising method that maximizes the sunlight exposure of the grapes.

Canopy management, the practice of maneuvering the leaves and fruit into the best position for a given vineyard, is a popular buzzword. See Chapter 3. But ripeness is a subjective issue. In warmer climates, ripeness is almost automatic; the trick becomes not letting the grapes get too ripe too fast, which causes them to be high in sugar but still physiologically immature and undeveloped in their flavors like a physically precocious but immature teenager.

Their reasons have to do with the health of the land, and often their belief that organically grown grapes are superior to conventionally farmed grapes, and that they make better wine.

For a wine label in the Unites States to state that the grapes for that wine were grown organically, the vineyard must be certified as organic by a governmentapproved organization. A related term is biodynamic; this means that the vineyards are not only organic but also are farmed in keeping with the principles established in the early 20th century by Austrian philosopher Rudolph Steiner, which involve cosmic aspects such as respecting the movement of the moon and the planets in the timing of the work on the land.

Biodynamic wines enjoy almost a cult following. When wood becomes magic Oak barrels, 60 gallons in size, are often used as containers for wine during either fermentation or maturation. The barrels lend oaky flavor and aroma to the wine, which many people find very appealing; they can also affect the texture of the wine and its color.

Most people consider French oak to be the finest. We suppose the expense is one good reason to boast about using the barrels. Chapter 5: Behind the Scenes of Winemaking But not all oak is the same. Oak barrels vary in the origin of their oak, the amount of toast a charring of the inside of the barrels each barrel has, how often the barrels have been used their oaky character diminishes with use , and even the size of the barrels. Even if all oak were the same, a wine can turn out differently depending on whether unfermented juice or actual wine went into the barrels, and how long it stayed there.

In fact, the whole issue of oak is so complex that anyone who suggests that a wine is better simply because it has been oaked is guilty of gross oversimplification. What in the world does he mean, and should you care? The term barrel-fermented means that unfermented juice went into barrels almost always oak and changed into wine there.

The term barrel-aged usually means that wine already fermented went into barrels and stayed there for a maturation period — from a few months to a couple of years.

Because most wines that ferment in barrels remain there for several months after fermentation ends, barrel-fermented and barrel-aged are often used together. Theterm barrel-aged alone suggests that the fermentation happened somewhere other than the barrel — usually in stainless steel tanks.

Classic barrel-fermentation — juice into the barrel, wine out — applies mainly to white wines, and the reason is very practical. As we mention in Chapter 2, the juice of red grapes ferments together with the grape skins in order to become red, and those solids are mighty messy to clean out of a small barrel! Red wines usually ferment in larger containers — stainless steel tanks or large wooden vats — and then age in small oak barrels after the wine has been drained off the grape skins. Some light, fruity styles of red wine may not be oaked at all.

Some winemakers do partially ferment their reds in barrels; they start the fermentation in tanks, then drain the juice from the skins and let that juice finish its fermentation in barrels, without the skins.

Wines that ferment in barrels actually end up tasting less oaky than wines that simply age in barrels, even though they may have spent more time in oak.

A barrel-fermented and barrel-aged Chardonnay may have spent 11 months in oak, for example, and a barrel-aged Chardonnay may have spent only 5 months in oak.

If you have a strong opinion about the flavor of oak in your wine, be sure that you know the real story. Even More Winemaking Terms Become a wine expert overnight and dazzle your friends with this amazing array of wine jargon.

The merit of each procedure depends on the particular wine being made. But, hey, this process was revolutionary and exciting almost half a century ago. These solids can interact with the wine and create more complex flavors in the wine. Sometimes the winemaker stirs the lees around in the wine periodically to prevent off-flavors. A white wine with extended lees contact is usually richer in texture and tastes less overtly fruity than it would otherwise.

ML usually happens naturally, but a winemaker can also incite it or prevent it. Some tannins give wines rich texture and an impression of substance without tasting bitter; other tannins are astringent and mouthdrying. Soft tannins, or ripe tannins, are buzzphrases for the good kind. Winemakers achieve soft tannins by harvesting fully ripe grapes, controlling fermentation time and temperature, and using other techniques.

One effect is that it can mimic the gentle, steady exposure to oxygen that barrel-aged red wines receive as they mature in wood, and can thus help red wines develop softer tannins and more stable color without any actual use of oak. You hear this term, sometimes abbreviated as microx, thrown around in technical circles. The purpose of these procedures is to clarify the wine — that is, to remove any cloudiness or solid matter in the wine — and to stabilize it — to remove any yeast, bacteria, or other microscopic critters that may change the wine for the worse after it is bottled.

For one thing, there are degrees of fining and filtration, like light fining and gentle filtration. These processes, when carried out carefully, are not detrimental to wine.

Winemakers generally ferment the different grapes separately and then blend their wines together. The reasons for blending wines of different grapes are either to reduce costs — by diluting an expensive wine like Chardonnay with something else far less expensive, for example — or to improve the quality of the wine by using complementary grapes whose characteristics enhance each other. When you hear these terms, understand them to mean that the person using them really wants you to believe that his wine is special.

Then decide for yourself, by tasting, whether it is. We promise. Buying Wine Can Intimidate Anyone Common sense suggests that buying a few bottles of wine should be less stressful than, say, applying for a bank loan or interviewing for a new job. But memories tell us otherwise. Were we wrong about the wine or were they arrogant?

We wasted days wondering. We might have received good advice. Then there were the many times we spent staring at shelves lined with bottles whose labels might as well have been written in Greek, for all that we could understand from them. Fortunately, our enthusiasm for wine caused us to persevere. We eventually discovered that wine shopping can be fun. Wine Retailers, Large and Small Buying wine in a store to drink later at home is great for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that stores usually have a much bigger selection of wines than restaurants do, and they charge you less for them.

You can examine the bottles carefully and compare the labels. And you can drink the wine at home from the glass — and at the temperature — of your choosing. On the other hand, you have to provide your own wine glasses, and you have to open the bottle yourself see Chapter 8 for the lowdown on all that. And that big selection of wines in the store can be downright daunting.

Depending on where you live, you can buy wine at all sorts of stores: supermarkets, wine superstores, discount warehouses, or small specialty wine shops. Each type of store has its own advantages and disadvantages in terms of selection, price, or service. Wine is a regulated beverage in many countries, and governments often get involved in deciding where and how wine may be sold.

Some states within the United States and some provinces in Canada have raised government control of alcoholic beverage sales to a fine art, deciding not only where you can buy wine, but which wines are available for you to buy.

We hope that scenario applies where you live, because your enjoyment of wine will blossom all the more easily if it does. Supermarkets, superstores, and so on In truly open wine markets, you can buy wine in supermarkets, like any other food product.

Supermarkets and their large-scale brethren, discount warehouses, make wine accessible to everyone. When wine is sold in supermarkets or discount stores, the mystique surrounding the product evaporates: Who can waste time feeling insecure about a wine purchase when there are much more critical issues at hand, such as how much time is left before the kids turn into monsters and which is the shortest line at the checkout?

And the prices, especially in large stores, are usually quite reasonable. The downside of buying wine in these stores is that your selection is often limited to wines produced by large wineries that generate enough volume to sell to supermarket chains. We know for a fact that some people in the wine business disapprove of the straightforward attitude toward wine in supermarkets and discount stores; they think wine is sacrosanct and should always be treated like an elite beverage.

These wines usually are decent but not great , and if you like the wines, they can be excellent values. To guide you on your wine-buying journey, many stores offer plenty of shelf-talkers small signs on the shelves that describe individual wines. These shelf-talkers should be taken with a very large grain of salt. They are often provided by the company selling the wine, which is more interested in convincing you to grab a bottle than in offering information to help you understand the wine.

The information will be biased and of limited value. We strongly recommend that you find a knowledgeable person from the store to help you, if at all possible, rather than rely on shelf-talkers. What have you got to lose? The bottom line is that supermarkets and discount warehouses can be great places to buy everyday wine for casual enjoyment.

But if what you really want is to learn about wine as you buy it, or if you want an unusually interesting variety of wines to satisfy your rapacious curiosity, you will probably find yourself shopping elsewhere.

Wine specialty shops Wine specialty shops are small- to medium-sized stores that sell wine and liquor and, sometimes, wine books, corkscrews see Chapter 8 for more on those , wine glasses, and maybe a few specialty foods. The foods sold in wine shops tend to be gourmet items rather than just run-of-the-mill snack foods. For one thing, wine specialty shops almost always have wine-knowledgeable staffers on the premises. Also, you can usually find an interesting, varied selection of wines at all price levels.

Red wines and white wines are often in separate sections within these country areas. There may be a special section for Champagnes and other sparkling wines and another section for dessert wines.

A few organize the wines according to grape varieties. Chapter 6: Navigating a Wine Shop Some wine shops have a special area or even a super-special, temperaturecontrolled room for the finer or more expensive wines. Unless you really must have an ice-cold bottle of wine immediately the two of you have just decided to elope, the marriage minister is a mile down the road, and the wedding toast is only ten minutes away , avoid the cold box.

The wines in there are usually too cold and, therefore, may not be in good condition. You never know how long the bottle you select has been sitting there under frigid conditions, numbed lifeless. Near the front of the store you may also see boxes or bins of special sale wines. When in doubt, try one bottle first before committing to a larger quantity.

Sale displays are usually topped with case cards — large cardboard signs that stand above the open boxes of wine — or similar descriptive material. Ten clues for identifying a store where you should not buy wine 1. Many of the white wines are dark gold or light-brown in color. The most recent vintage in the store is The colors on all the wine labels have faded from bright sunlight.

Most of the bottles are standing up. All the bottles are standing up! The owner resembles the stern teacher who always hated you. The main criteria are fair prices, a wide selection, staff expertise, and service.

Also, the shop must store its wines in the proper conditions. No such species in your neighborhood? If you outgrow the selection as you learn more about wine, you can seek out a new merchant at that point.

Some retailers are not only extremely knowledgeable about the specific wines they sell, but also extremely knowledgeable about wine in general. But some retailers know less than their customers. Just as you expect a butcher to know his cuts of meat, you should expect a wine merchant to know wine. Chapter 6: Navigating a Wine Shop Expect a wine merchant to have personal knowledge and experience of the wines he sells.

These days, a lot of retailers use the ratings of a few critics as a crutch in selling wines. Expecting service with a smile Most knowledgeable wine merchants pride themselves in their ability to guide you through the maze of wine selections and help you find a wine that you will like.

All it will have cost you is the price of a bottle or two of wine. Much less costly than choosing the wrong doctor or lawyer! Speaking of service, any reputable wine merchant will accept a bottle back from you if he has made a poor recommendation or if the wine seems damaged.

After all, he wants to keep you as a customer. But with the privilege comes responsibility: Be reasonable. You should return an open bottle only if you think the wine is defective — in which case the bottle should be mostly full! By that time, the store may have a hard time reselling the wine. After a week or two, consider the wine yours whether you like it or not. In fact, some wines — usually the more expensive ones — can get better and better as they get older.

But if wine is not stored properly, its taste can suffer. For advice on storing wine in your own home, see in Chapter The very best shops will have climate-controlled storerooms for wine — although, frankly, these shops are in the minority. A dry cork can crack or shrink and let air into the bottle, which will spoil the wine. A short time upright does not affect wine much, and so stores with a high turnover can get away with storing their fast-selling wines that way, but slower selling, expensive bottles, especially those intended for long maturation in your cellar will fare better in the long run lying down.

And there have certainly been instances when wine has been damaged by extremes of weather even before it got to the distributor — for example, while sitting on the docks in the dead of winter or the dead of summer or while traveling through the Panama Canal. A good retailer will check out the quality of the wine before he buys it, or he will send it back if he discovers the problem after he has already bought the wine.

Strategies for Wine Shopping When you get beyond all the ego-compromising innuendo associated with buying wine, you can really have fun in wine shops. We remember when we first caught the wine bug. We spent countless hours on Saturdays visiting different wine stores near our home. To a passionate wine lover, 50 miles can be near.

Trips to other cities offered new opportunities to explore. So many wines, so little time. Naturally, we made our share of mistakes along the way, but we learned a lot of good lessons. And we never have wine shipped to us other than quick deliveries from our local shop at the height of summer or winter.

First, patronize retailers who seem to care about their wine and who provide their customers with good service. Second, be attentive to seasonal weather patterns when buying wine or when having it shipped to you. Wines that move through the distribution chain very quickly have less opportunity to be damaged along the way.

But in retrospect, we let ourselves get stuck in a rut because we were afraid to take a chance on anything new. If wine was really going to be fun, we realized, we had to be a little more adventuresome. If you want to experience the wonderful array of wines in the world, experimenting is a must. New wines can be interesting and exciting. Explain what you want The following scene — or something very much like it — occurs in every wine shop every day and ten times every Saturday : Customer: I remember that the wine had a yellow label.

I had it in this little restaurant last week. Wine Merchant: Do you recall the grape variety? Customer: No, but I think it has a deer or a moose on the label. Maybe if I walk around, I can spot it. Needless to say, most of the time that customer never finds the wine he or she is looking for. Describe what you like in clear, simple terms. For detailed guidance in describing the taste of wines, read our book Wine Style Wiley.

But the wine tastings that some retailers arrange in their stores do have their limitations. In addition to the fact that you usually get a miniscule serving in a little plastic cup more suited to dispensing pills in a hospital, you get to taste only the wines that the wine merchant or one of his suppliers happens to be pushing that day. Whether you like the wine or not, you may feel some pressure to buy it after trying it.

Our advice to you is not to succumb to any conscious or unconscious sales pressure. Buy the wine only if you really like it — and even then, buy only one bottle to start. If it tastes even better than you thought, you can always buy more bottles later. This is especially important if the store does not have a climate-control system.

The more information about the recipe or main flavors you can provide, the better your chance of getting a good match. Tell your wine merchant what kind of food you plan to have with the wine.

This will narrow down your choices even more. The wine you drink with your flounder is probably not the one you want with spicy chili! A good wine merchant is invaluable in helping you match your wine with food. Chapter 19 tells you more about the subject.

Fix two price ranges in your mind: one for everyday purposes, and one for special occasions. A good retailer with an adequate selection should be able to make several wine suggestions in your preferred price category. There are plenty of decent, enjoyable wines at that price. You also can bask in the compliments of your family and friends during the whole meal and go home feeling good about yourself.

Fortunately, practice does make perfect, at least most of the time. The Restaurant Wine Experience Here and there, you might come across a restaurant with a retail wine shop on the premises, a useful hybrid of a place where you can look over all the bottles, read the labels, browse through wine books and magazines, and then carry your chosen bottle to your table.

Unfortunately, such establishments are rarer than four-leaf clovers. In most restaurants, you have to choose your wine from a menu that tells you only the names of the wines and the price per bottle — and manages to make even that little bit of information somewhat incomprehensible.

Welcome to the restaurant wine list. Restaurant wine lists can be infuriating. With a little guidance and a few tips, you can navigate the choppy waters of the wine list.

How Wine Is Sold in Restaurants Believe it or not, restaurateurs really do want you to buy their wine. They usually make a sizable profit on every sale; their servers earn bigger tips and become happier employees; and you enjoy your meal more, going home a more satisfied customer. But traditionally and, we trust, unwittingly , many restaurants have done more to hinder wine sales than to encourage them. Fortunately, the old ways are changing. These can be purchased by the glass or in a carafe a wide-mouthed, handle-less pitcher.

They are the wines you get when you simply ask for a glass of white or a glass of red. These offer a wider selection than the house wines and are generally better quality.

These wines are usually available also by the bottle. The choice of the house The wine list looks so imposing that you finally give up laboring over it. It might be just what you wanted — and you avoided the effort of plowing through that list.

Often, the entire bottle costs the proprietor the price of one glass or less! On the other hand, you may not want an entire carafe of the house wine! Under most circumstances, avoid the house wine. If the house wine is your only option, ask the server what it is. Chardonnay from where? What brand? Ask to see the bottle. Premium pours The word premium is used very loosely by the wine industry. As used in the phrase premium wines by the glass, however, premium usually does connote better quality.

These are red and white wines that a restaurant sells at a higher price than its basic house wines. Oh, we get it: You pay a premium for them!

Wine by the glass is a growing trend despite the challenges that it presents to restaurateurs. Their main problem is preserving the wine in all those open bottles. To solve this problem, restaurateurs must have some sort of wine preservation system — sometimes an attractive console behind the bar that injects inert gas into the open bottles to displace oxygen, or some simpler, behind-thescenes gadget to protect the leftover wine from air.

Their wine profits will go right down the drain! Or into the stew! A restaurant may offer just one premium white and one red, or it may offer several choices. These premium wines are not anonymous beverages, like the house red and white, but are identified for you somehow — on the wine list, on a separate card, verbally, or sometimes even by a display of bottles. In some informal restaurants, wines by the glass are listed on a chalkboard.

Ordering premium wines by the glass is a fine idea, especially if you want to have only a glass or two or if you and your guests want to experiment by trying several wines. Sometimes we order a glass of a premium white wine or glass of Champagne as a starter and then go on to a bottle of red wine.

Not every restaurant offers premium wines by the glass. If two or three of you are ordering the same wine by the glass — and especially if you might want refills — ask how many ounces are poured into each glass usually five to eight ounces and compare the price with that of a You usually do have the option of buying an entire bottle.

Sometimes, for the cost of only three glasses you can have the whole bottle. Special, or reserve, wine lists Some restaurants offer a special wine list of rare wines to supplement their regular wine list.

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This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below! Hoboken, NJ www. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Wiley Publishing, Inc. For general information on our other products and services, please contact our Customer Care Department within the U. For technical support, please visit www. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. They have since coauthored six wine books in the Wine For Dummies series including two of their favorites, French Wine For Dummies and Italian Wine For Dummies as well as their latest book, Wine Style Wiley ; taught hundreds of wine classes together; visited nearly every wine region in the world; run five marathons; and raised eleven cats.

She is also the long-standing wine columnist of the NY Daily News. He taught high school English in another life, while working part-time in wine shops to satisfy his passion for wine and to subsidize his growing wine cellar.

That cellar is especially heavy in his favorite wines — Bordeaux, Barolo, and Champagne. They are each columnists for the online wine magazine, WineReviewOnline. They admit to leading thoroughly unbalanced lives in which their only non-wine pursuits are hiking in the Berkshires and the Italian Alps. At home, they wind down to the tunes of U2, K. Because three years have passed since the third edition of Wine For Dummies, we decided to revise and update the book.

We especially felt an obligation to write this fourth edition because of all the readers who have personally told us how valuable Wine For Dummies has been to them. But this book would not have been possible without the team at Wiley. Really special thanks go to our Project Editor, Traci Cumbay, who made excellent suggestions to improve the text. We thank our technical reviewer, colleague Igor Ryjenkov, MW, for his expertise.

Special thanks to Steve Ettlinger, our agent and friend, who brought us to the For Dummies series in the first place, and who is always there for us. We thank all our friends in the wine business for your information and kind suggestions for our book; the book reviewers, whose criticism has been so generous; and our readers, who have encouraged us with your enthusiasm for our previous books in this series. Mary offers special thanks to Linda Lawry and everyone else at International Wine Center, who enabled her to have the time and the peace of mind to work on this book.

Thanks also to Elise McCarthy, E. Is it a place? We love the way it tastes, we love the fascinating variety of wines in the world, and we love the way wine brings people together at the dinner table.

We believe that you and everyone else should be able to enjoy wine — regardless of your experience or your budget. You have to know strange names of grape varieties and foreign wine regions.

You even need a special tool to open the bottle once you get it home! All this complication surrounding wine will never go away, because wine is a very rich and complex field. With the right attitude and a little understanding of what wine is, you can begin to buy and enjoy wine. And if, like us, you decide that wine is fascinating, you can find out more and turn it into a wonderful hobby. Because we hate to think that wine, which has brought so much pleasure into our lives, could be the source of anxiety for anyone, we want to help you feel more comfortable around wine.

Some knowledge of wine, gleaned from the pages of this book and from our shared experiences, will go a long way toward increasing your comfort level. You see, after you really get a handle on wine, you discover that no one knows everything there is to know about wine. And when you know that, you can just relax and enjoy the stuff. About This Book If you already have a previous edition of Wine For Dummies, you may be wondering whether you need this book. We believe that you do. Web sites on wine have come and gone.

The wine auction scene bears almost no resemblance to what it was. Our recommendations reflect all these changes. Well, big surprise: Just about all those prices have increased. We wrote this book to be an easy-to-use reference. Simply turn to the section that interests you and dig in. Depending on where you fall on the wine-knowledge gradient, different chapters will be relevant to you.

We tell you the basic types of wine, how to taste it, which grapes make wine, why winemaking matters, and how wines are named. Find out how to handle snooty wine clerks, restaurant wine lists, and those stubborn corks. In addition, we show you how to decipher cryptic wine labels.

We tell you how to describe and rate wines you taste, and how to pair food and wine. We also tell you how to store wine properly, and how to pursue your love and knowledge of wine beyond this book.

You can also consult our vintage chart to check out the quality and drinkability of your wine. Where you see him, feel free to skip over the technical information that follows. Wine will still taste just as delicious. This symbol warns you about common pitfalls. Some issues in wine are so fundamental that they bear repeating. Wine snobs practice all sorts of affectations designed to make other wine drinkers feel inferior. And you can learn how to impersonate a wine snob!

To our tastes, the wines we mark with this icon are bargains because we like them, we believe them to be of good quality, and their price is low compared to other wines of similar type, style, or quality. We mark such wines with this icon, and hope that your search proves fruitful. We start slowly so that you can enjoy the scenery along the way. Been there, done that ourselves. But familiarity with certain aspects of wine can make choosing wines a lot easier, enhance your enjoyment of wine, and increase your comfort level.

You can learn as much or as little as you like. The journey begins here. How Wine Happens Wine is, essentially, nothing but liquid, fermented fruit. The recipe for turning fruit into wine goes something like this: 1. Pick a large quantity of ripe grapes from grapevines. You could substitute raspberries or any other fruit, but Crush the grapes somehow to release their juice.

Once upon a time, feet performed this step. In its most basic form, winemaking is that simple. When the yeasts are done working, your grape juice is wine. The sugar that was in the juice is no longer there — alcohol is present instead. The riper and sweeter the grapes, the more alcohol the wine will have.

This process is called fermentation. What could be more natural? Fermentation occurs in fresh apple cider left too long in your refrigerator, without any help from you. In fact we read that milk, which contains a different sort of sugar than grapes do, develops a small amount of alcohol if left on the kitchen table all day long. Speaking of milk, Louis Pasteur is the man credited with discovering fermentation in the nineteenth century. Some of those apples in the Garden of Eden probably fermented long before Pasteur came along.

The men and women who make wine can control the type of container they use for the fermentation process stainless steel and oak are the two main materials , as well as the size of the container and the temperature of the juice during fermentation — and every one of these choices can make a big difference in the taste of the wine.

After fermentation, they can choose how long to let the wine mature a stage when the wine sort of gets its act together and in what kind of container. Fermentation can last three days or three months, and the wine can then mature for a couple of weeks or a couple of years or anything in between.

The main ingredient Obviously, one of the biggest factors in making one wine different from the next is the nature of the raw material, the grape juice.

Besides the fact that riper, sweeter grapes make a more alcoholic wine, different varieties of grapes Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, or Merlot, for example make different Chapter 1: Wine wines. Grapes are the main ingredient in wine, and everything the winemaker does, he does to the particular grape juice he has. Chapter 3 covers specific grapes and the kinds of wine they make. Where they grow — the soil and climate of each wine region, as well as the traditions and goals of the people who grow the grapes and make the wine — affects the nature of the ripe grapes, and the taste of the wine made from those grapes.

What Color Is Your Appetite? White wine is wine without any red color or pink color, which is in the red family. But yellow wines, golden wines, and wines that are as pale as water are all white wines. Wine becomes white wine in one of two ways. Did you see that one coming? White grapes are greenish, greenish yellow, golden yellow, or sometimes even pinkish yellow.

Basically, white grapes include all the grape types that are not dark red or dark bluish.

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Is white always right? You can drink white wine anytime you like — which for most people means as a drink without food or with lighter foods. Chapter 19 covers the dynamics of pairing wines with food. The skinny on sulfites Sulfur dioxide, a compound formed from sulfur and oxygen, occurs naturally during fermentation in very small quantities. Winemakers add it, too. Sulfur dioxide is to wine what aspirin and vitamin E are to humans — a wonder drug that cures all sorts of afflictions and prevents others.

Sulfur dioxide is an antibacterial, preventing the wine from turning to vinegar. It inhibits yeasts, preventing sweet wines from refermenting in the bottle. Despite these magical properties, winemakers try to use as little sulfur dioxide as possible because many of them share a belief that the less you add to wine, the better just as many people prefer to ingest as little medication as possible.

Approximately 5 percent of asthmatics are extremely sensitive to sulfites. Considering that about 10 to 20 parts per million occur naturally in wine, that covers just about every wine. Actual sulfite levels in wine range from about 30 to parts per million about the same as in dried apricots ; the legal max in the United States is White dessert wines have the most sulfur — followed by medium-sweet white wines and blush wines — because those types of wine need the most protection.

Dry white wines generally have less, and dry reds have the least. We also explain the styles in plentiful detail in our book, Wine Style Wiley. Turn to Chapter 3 for the lowdown on oak. Most Italian white wines, like Soave and Pinot Grigio, and some French whites, like Sancerre and some Chablis wines, fall into this category.

Examples include a lot of German wines, and wines from flavorful grape varieties such as Riesling or Viognier. Most Chardonnays and many French wines — like many of those from the Burgundy region of France — fall into this group. We serve white wines cool, but not ice-cold. Sometimes restaurants serve white wines too cold, and we actually have to wait a while for the wine to warm up before we drink it. In Chapter 8, we recommend specific serving temperatures for various types of wine.

Red, red wine In this case, the name is correct. Red wines really are red. Red wines are made from grapes that are red or bluish in color. So guess what wine people call these grapes?

Black grapes! The most obvious difference between red wine and white wine is color. See Chapter 2 for more about tannin. The presence of tannin in red wines is actually the most important taste difference between red wines and white wines.

Red wines vary quite a lot in style. This is partly because winemakers have so many ways of adjusting their red-winemaking to achieve the kind of wine they want. For example, if winemakers leave the juice in contact with the skins for a long time, the wine becomes more tannic firmer in the mouth, like strong tea; tannic wines can make you pucker. If winemakers drain the juice off the skins sooner, the wine is softer and less tannic. Usually, they blame the sulfites in the wine.

Red wines do contain histamine-like compounds and other substances derived from the grape skins that could be the culprits. Red wine tends to be consumed more often as part of a meal than as a drink on its own. Thanks to the wide range of red wine styles, you can find red wines to go with just about every type of food and every occasion when you want to drink wine except the times when you want to drink a wine with bubbles, because most bubbly wines are white or pink.

In Chapter 19, we give you some tips on matching red wine with food. One sure way to spoil the fun in drinking most red wines is to drink them too cold. Those tannins can taste really bitter when the wine is cold — just as in a cold glass of very strong tea. On the other hand, many restaurants serve red wines too warm.

Where do they store them? Next to the boiler? For more about serving wine at the right temperature, see Chapter 8. That would be too simple.

But even a child can see that White Zinfandel is really pink. Which type when? Choosing a color usually is the starting point for selecting a specific wine in a wine shop or in a restaurant. As we explain in Chapters 6 and 7, most stores and most restaurant wine lists arrange wines by color before making other distinctions, such as grape varieties, wine regions, or taste categories. Although certain foods can straddle the line between white wine and red wine compatibility — grilled salmon, for example, can be delicious with a rich white wine or a fruity red — your preference for red, white, or pink wine will often be your first consideration in pairing wine with food, too.

Pairing food and wine is one of the most fun aspects of wine, because the possible combinations are almost limitless. We get you started with the pairing principles and a few specific suggestions in Chapter Best of all, your personal taste rules!

Our own answer is always Champagne, with a capital C more on the capitalization later in this section. We welcome guests with it, we celebrate with it after our team wins a Sunday football game, and we toast our cats with it on their birthdays.

What we drink every night is regular wine — red, white, or pink — without bubbles. There are various names for these wines. When a red wine just seems too heavy 3.

With lunch — hamburgers, grilled cheese sandwiches, and so on 4. On picnics on warm, sunny days 5. On warm evenings 7. To celebrate the arrival of spring or summer 8. With ham hot or cold or other pork dishes 9. When you feel like putting ice cubes in your wine Table wine Table wine, or light wine, is fermented grape juice whose alcohol content falls within a certain range. Furthermore, table wine is not bubbly.

Some table wines have a very slight carbonation, but not enough to disqualify them as table wines. According to U. The use of gonzo yeast strains that continue working even when the alcohol exceeds 14 percent is another factor. Dessert wine Many wines have more than 14 percent alcohol because the winemaker added alcohol during or after the fermentation.

We discuss those wines in Chapter Dessert wine is the legal U. We find that term misleading, because dessert wines are not always sweet and not always consumed after dinner. In Europe, this category of wines is called liqueur wines, which carries the same connotation of sweetness. We prefer the term fortified, which suggests that the wine has been strengthened with additional alcohol. But until we get elected to run things, the term will have to be dessert wine or liqueur wine.

It can be expressed in degrees, like The labels are allowed to lie. If the label states The leeway does not entitle the wineries to exceed the 14 percent maximum, however. Chapter 1: Wine Sparkling wine and a highly personal spelling lesson Sparkling wines are wines that contain carbon dioxide bubbles.

Carbon dioxide gas is a natural byproduct of fermentation, and winemakers sometimes decide to trap it in the wine. Just about every country that makes wine also makes sparkling wine. In Chapter 14, we discuss how sparkling wine is made and describe the major sparkling wines of the world. In the United States, Canada, and Europe, sparkling wine is the official name for the category of wines with bubbles.

Champagne with a capital C is the most famous sparkling wine — and probably the most famous wine, for that matter. Champagne is a specific type of sparkling wine made from certain grape varieties and produced in a certain way that comes from a region in France called Champagne. It is the undisputed Grand Champion of Bubblies. Unfortunately for the people of Champagne, France, their wine is so famous that the name champagne has been borrowed again and again by producers elsewhere, until the word has become synonymous with practically the whole category of sparkling wines.

Even now, those American wineries that were already using that name may continue to do so. They do have to add a qualifying geographic term such as American or Californian before the word Champagne, however. Popular white wines These types of white wine are available almost everywhere in the United States. The French are that serious. To us, this seems perfectly fair. We have too much respect for the people and the traditions of Champagne, France, where the best sparkling wines in the world are made.

Those are the wines we want on our desert island, not just any sparkling wine from anywhere that calls itself champagne. I do it every day, three to five times a day.

All that wine-tasting humbug is just another way of making wine complicated. Anyone who can taste coffee or a hamburger can taste wine. All you need are a nose, taste buds, and a brain. You also have all that it takes to speak Mandarin. Having the ability to do something is different from knowing how to do it and applying that know-how in everyday life, however.

The Special Technique for Tasting Wine You drink beverages every day, tasting them as they pass through your mouth. In the case of wine, however, drinking and tasting are not synonymous. But if you taste wine, you can discover its nuances. In fact, the more slowly and attentively you taste wine, the more interesting it tastes.

And with that, we have the two fundamental rules of wine tasting: 1. Slow down. Pay attention. First you look at the wine, and then you smell it. Stick your nose right into the airspace of the glass where the aromas are captured. Smell every ingredient when you cook, everything you eat, the fresh fruits and vegetables you buy at the supermarket, even the smells of your environment — like leather, wet earth, fresh road tar, grass, flowers, your wet dog, shoe polish, and your medicine cabinet.

Keeping your mouth open a bit while you inhale can help you perceive aromas. Notice how dark or how pale the wine is, what color it is, and whether the color fades from the center of the wine out toward the edge, where it touches the glass. Also notice whether the wine is cloudy, clear, or brilliant. Most wines are clear. Some wines form legs or tears that flow slowly down.

Once upon a time, these legs were interpreted as the sure sign of a rich, high-quality wine. The nose knows Now we get to the really fun part of tasting wine: swirling and sniffing. This is when you can let your imagination run wild, and no one will ever dare to contradict you. To get the most out of your sniffing, swirl the wine in the glass first. Keep your glass on the table and rotate it three or four times so that the wine swirls around inside the glass and mixes with air.

If he says that he detects lemon in the nose or on the nose, he means that the wine smells a bit like lemons. In fact, most wine tasters rarely use the word smell to describe how a wine smells because the word smell like the word odor seems pejorative. Sometimes they use the word bouquet, although that word is falling out of fashion.

Just as a wine taster might use the term nose for the smell of a wine, he might use the word palate in referring to the taste of a wine. As you swirl, the aromas in the wine vaporize, so that you can smell them. Wine has so many aromatic compounds that whatever you find in the smell of a wine is probably not merely a figment of your imagination. The point behind this whole ritual of swirling and sniffing is that what you smell should be pleasurable to you, maybe even fascinating, and that you should have fun in the process.

Of course you do! And when you do catch the wine bug, you may discover that those aromas, in the right wine, can really be a kick. Then there are the bad smells that nobody will try to defend. Often when a wine is seriously flawed, it shows immediately in the nose of the wine. Wine judges have a term for such wines. Just rack it up to experience and open a different bottle. Smelling wine is really just a matter of practice and attention.

This is when grown men and women sit around and make strange faces, gurgling the wine and sloshing it around in their mouths with looks of intense concentration in their eyes. You can make an enemy for life if you distract a wine taster just at the moment when he is focusing all his energy on the last few drops of a special wine. Take a medium-sized sip of wine. Hold it in your mouth, purse your lips, and draw in some air across your tongue, over the wine.

Then swish the wine around in your mouth as if you are chewing it. Then swallow it. The whole process should take several seconds, depending on how much you are concentrating on the wine. Wondering what to concentrate on? These include sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami, a savory characteristic. Of these tastes, sweetness, sourness, and bitterness are those most commonly found in wine.

As you swish the wine around in your mouth, you are also buying time. Your brain needs a few seconds to figure out what the tongue is tasting and make some sense of it. Any sweetness in the wine registers in your brain first because many of the taste buds on the front of your tongue — where the wine hits first — capture the sensation of sweetness; acidity which, by the way, is what normal people call sourness and bitterness register subsequently.

Where have all the wild strawberries gone? But to be perfectly correct about it, these flavors are actually aromas that you taste, not through tongue contact, but by inhaling them up an interior nasal passage in the back of your mouth called the retronasal passage see Figure When you draw in air across the wine in your mouth, you are vaporizing the aromas just as you did when you swirled the wine in your glass.

But most of the time you have to buy the stuff without tasting it first. Naturally, it helps if we all speak the same language. In case you really want to get into this wine thing, we treat you to some sophisticated wine language in Chapters 5 and For now, a few basic words and concepts should do the trick. Sweetness As soon as you put the wine into your mouth, you can usually notice sweetness or the lack of it.

In Winespeak, dry is the opposite of sweet. Acidity All wine contains acid mainly tartaric acid, which exists in grapes , but some wines are more acidic than others. Acidity is more of a taste factor in white wines than in reds. White wines with a high amount of acidity feel crisp, and those without enough acidity feel flabby. You generally perceive acidity in the middle of your mouth — what winetasters call the mid-palate. Because red wines are fermented with their grape skins and pips, and because red grape varieties are generally higher in tannin than white varieties, tannin levels are far higher in red wines than in white wines.

Oak barrels can also contribute tannin to wines, both reds and whites. Have you ever taken a sip of a red wine and rapidly experienced a drying-out feeling in your mouth, as if something had blotted up all your saliva? Is it sweetness or fruitiness? Beginning wine tasters sometimes describe dry wines as sweet because they confuse fruitiness with sweetness. A wine is fruity when it has distinct aromas and flavors of fruit.

Sweetness, on the other hand, is a tactile impression on your tongue. Chapter 2: These Taste Buds Are for You Touchy-feely Softness and firmness are actually textural impressions a wine gives you as you taste it.

Just as your mouth feels temperature in a liquid, it feels texture. Some wines literally feel soft and smooth as they move through your mouth, while others feel hard, rough, or coarse. In white wines, acid is usually responsible for impressions of hardness or firmness or crispness ; in red wines, tannin is usually responsible.

Low levels of either substance can make a wine feel pleasantly soft — or too soft, depending on the wine and your taste preferences. Unfermented sugar also contributes to an impression of softness, and alcohol can, too.

But very high alcohol — which is fairly common in wines these days — can give a wine an edge of hardness. To generalize a bit, tannin is to a red wine what acidity is to a white: a backbone. Tannins alone can taste bitter, but some tannins in wine are less bitter than others. You sense tannin — as bitterness, or as firmness or richness of texture — mainly in the rear of your mouth and, if the amount of tannin in a wine is high, on the inside of your cheeks and on your gums.

Depending on the amount and nature of its tannin, you can describe a red wine as astringent, firm, or soft. But some wines seem fuller, bigger, or heavier in the mouth than others. Imagine that your tongue is a tiny scale and judge how much the wine is weighing it down.

Classify the wine as light-bodied, medium-bodied, or full-bodied. Red wines have acid as well as tannin, and distinguishing between the two as you taste a wine can be a real challenge. Acid makes you salivate saliva is alkaline, and it flows to neutralize the acid.

Tannin leaves your mouth dry. Instead, you should refer to families of flavors in wine. You have your fruity wines the ones that make you think of all sorts of fruit when you smell them or taste them , your earthy wines these make you think of minerals and rocks, walks in the forest, turning the earth in your garden, dry leaves, and so on , your spicy wines cinnamon, cloves, black pepper, or Indian spices, for example , your herbal wines mint, grass, hay, rosemary, and so on , and so on, and so on.

There are so many flavors in wine that we could go on and on and we often do! Some wines are as flavorful as a Big Mac, while others have flavors as subtle as fillet of sole. Flavor intensity is a major factor in pairing wine with food, as you can read in Chapter 19, and it also helps determine how much you like a wine.

The Quality Issue Did you notice, by any chance, that nowhere among the terms we use to describe wines are the words great, very good, or good? Chapter 2: These Taste Buds Are for You Wine producers constantly brag about the quality ratings that their wines receive from critics, because a high rating — implying high quality — translates into increased sales for a wine.

But quality wines come in all colors, degrees of sweetness and dryness, and flavor profiles. Personal taste is simply more relevant than quality in choosing a wine. Nevertheless, degrees of quality do exist among wines. Turn to Chapter 19 for more about expert opinion.

A good wine is, above all, a wine that you like enough to drink — because the whole purpose of a wine is to give pleasure to those who drink it. After that, how good a wine is depends on how it measures up to a set of more or less agreed-upon standards of performance established by experienced, trained experts. None of these concepts is objectively measurable, by the way.

The fourth is alcohol. Besides being one of the reasons we usually want to drink a glass of wine in the first place, alcohol is an important element of wine quality. Balance is the relationship of these four components to one another.

A wine is balanced when nothing sticks out as you taste it, like harsh tannin or too much sweetness. Most wines are balanced to most people. But if you have any pet peeves about food — if you really hate anything tart, for example, or if you never eat sweets — you may perceive some wines to be unbalanced. If you perceive them to be unbalanced, then they are unbalanced for you. Professional tasters know their own idiosyncrasies and adjust for them when they judge wine.

The perception of the basic tastes on the tongue varies from one person to the next. Research has proven that some people have more taste buds than others, and are therefore more sensitive to characteristics such as sourness or bitterness in food and beverages. If you find diet sodas very bitter, or if you need to add a lot of sugar to your coffee to make it palatable, you may fall into this category — and you therefore may find many red wines unpleasant, even if other people consider them great.

Tannin and acidity are hardening elements in a wine they make a wine taste firmer in the mouth , while alcohol and sugar if any are softening elements. The balance of a wine is the interrelationship of the hard and the soft aspects of a wine, and a key indicator of quality. Length is a word used to describe a wine that gives an impression of going all the way on the palate — you can taste it across the full length of your tongue — rather than stopping short halfway through your tasting of it.

They are short. Generally, high alcohol or excess tannin is to blame. Length is a sure sign of high quality. Depth This is another subjective, unmeasurable attribute of a high-quality wine. We say a wine has depth when it seems to have a dimension of verticality — that is, it does not taste flat and one-dimensional in your mouth. But a wine that keeps revealing different things about itself, always showing you a new flavor or impression — a wine that has complexity — is usually considered better quality.

Some experts use the term complexity specifically to indicate that a wine has a multiplicity of aromas and flavors, while others use it in a more holistic but less precise sense, to refer to the total impression a wine gives you. Chapter 2: These Taste Buds Are for You Balance in action For firsthand experience of how the principle of taste balance works, try this.

Make a very strong cup of tea, and chill it. Now add lemon juice; the tea will taste astringent constricting the pores in your mouth , because the acid of the lemon and the tannin of the tea are accentuating each other. Now add a lot of sugar to the tea. The sweetness should counter-balance the acid—tannin impact, and the tea will taste softer than it did before.

Finish The impression a wine leaves in the back of your mouth and in your throat after you have swallowed it is its finish or aftertaste. Some wines may finish hot, because of high alcohol, or bitter, because of tannin — both shortcomings. Or a wine may have nothing much at all to say for itself after you swallow. Typicity In order to judge whether a wine is true to its type, you have to know how that type is supposed to taste.

Turn to Chapter 3 and Chapters 9 through 15 for all those details. The fact is there are very few bad wines in the world today compared to even 20 years ago. And many of the wines we could call bad are actually just bad bottles of wine — bottles that were handled badly, so that the good wine inside them got ruined.

We hope you never meet one. That same taste of rot can be in a wine if the wine was made from grapes that were not completely fresh and healthy when they were harvested. Bad wine. Most wines today remain forever in the wine stage because of technology or careful winemaking. Bad wines. It may have been a good wine once, but air — oxygen — got in somehow and killed the wine.

Bad bottle. Unfortunately, every other bottle of that wine that experienced the same shipping or storage will also be bad. Change the channel. Gazing across manicured rows of grapevines in Napa Valley or pondering craggy terraces of rugged hillside vines in Portugal inspires us — and reinforces for us the fact that wine is an agricultural product, born of the earth, the grapevine, and the hard work of humans.

Literally and emotionally, grapes are the link between the land and the wine. Grapes also happen to give us one of the easiest ways of classifying wine and making sense of the hundreds of different types of wine that exist. Why Grapes Matter Grapes are the starting point of every wine, and therefore they are largely responsible for the style and personality of each wine.

The grapes that make a particular wine dictate the genetic structure of that wine and how it will respond to everything that the winemaker does to it. Think back to the last wine you drank.

What color was it? Did it smell herbal or earthy or fruity? Whichever, those aromas came mainly from the grapes. Was it firm and tannic or soft and voluptuous? Thank the grapes — with a nod to Mother Nature and the winemaker. So can winemaking processes such as oak aging see Chapter 5. Each grape variety reacts in its own way to the farming and winemaking techniques that it faces.

A variety is a subdivision of a species. This species originated in Europe and western Asia; other distinct species of Vitis are native to North America. Grapes of other species can also make wine; for example, the Concord grape, which makes Concord wine as well as grape juice and jelly, belongs to the native American species Vitis labrusca. But the grapes of this species have a very different flavor from vinifera grapes — foxy is the word used to describe that taste. The number of non-vinifera wines is small because their flavor is less popular in wine.

Within the genus Vitis and the species vinifera, there are as many as 10, varieties of wine grapes. If wine from every one of these varieties were commercially available and you drank the wine of a different variety every single day, it would take you more than 27 years to experience them all! Not that you would want to. Within those 10, varieties are grapes that have the ability to make extraordinary wine, grapes that tend to make very ordinary wine, and grapes that only a parent could love.

Most varieties are obscure grapes whose wines rarely enter into international commerce. The grape varieties you might encounter in the course of your normal wine enjoyment probably number fewer than The entire species was nearly eradicated by a tiny louse called phylloxera that immigrated to Europe from America and proceeded to feast on the roots of vinifera grapevines, wiping out vineyards across the continent. To this day, no remedy has been found to protect vinifera roots from phylloxera.

What saved the species was grafting vinifera vines onto rootstocks of native American species that are resistant to the bug. The practice of grafting the fruit-bearing part of Vitis vinifera onto the rooting part of other, phylloxera-resistant species continues today everywhere in the world where phylloxera is present and fine wine is made. The fruit-bearing part is called a scion, and the rooting plant is called a rootstock. Miraculously, each grape variety maintains its own character despite the fact that its roots are alien.

How grapes vary All sorts of attributes distinguish each grape variety from the next. These attributes fall into two categories: personality traits and performance factors. Personality traits are the characteristics of the fruit itself — its flavors, for example.

Performance factors refer to how the grapevine grows, how its fruit ripens, and how quickly it can get from 0 to 60 miles per hour. Personality traits of grape varieties Skin color is the most fundamental distinction among grape varieties. A few red-skinned varieties are further distinguished by having red pulp rather than white pulp. Some grapes have very neutral aromas and flavors and, therefore, make fairly neutral wines.

More tannin in the grapes translates into a firmer, more tannic red wine. As ripening progresses, they become sweeter and less acidic although they always retain some acid , and their flavors become richer and more complex. In red grape varieties, the tannin in the skins, stems, and pips becomes richer and less astringent. The stage of ripeness that the grapes attain is a big factor in the style of the wine. The composite personality traits of any grape variety are fairly evident in wines made from that grape.

Performance factors of grape varieties The performance factors that distinguish grape varieties are vitally important to the grape grower because those factors determine how easy or challenging it will be for him to cultivate a specific variety in his vineyard — if he can even grow it at all. In regions with short growing seasons, early-ripening varieties do best. In warm, damp climates, grape varieties with dense bunches can have mildew problems.

In any case, no two vineyards in the world have precisely the same combination of these factors — precisely the same terroir see Chapter 4. The issue simply defies simple generalizations. Chapter 3: Pinot Envy and Other Secrets about Grape Varieties Grape royalty and commoners Bees have their queens, gorillas have their silverbacks, and humans have their royal families.

The wines made from noble grapes on their home turf can be so great that they inspire winemakers in far-flung regions to grow the same grape in their own vineyards. The noble grape might prove itself noble there, too — but frequently the grape does not. One important factor in how a grape variety performs is the soil in the vineyard.

At any rate, these are the soils of the regions where these grape varieties perform at their legendary best. The wisdom of the ages dictates that the grapevine must struggle to produce the best grapes, and well-drained, less fertile soils challenge the vine to struggle, regardless of what variety the grapevine is.

Increasingly, growers plant their vineyards with several different clones to foster complexity. Nurseries propagate grapevines asexually, by taking cuttings from a mother plant and allowing A Primer on White Grape Varieties This section includes descriptions of the 12 most important white vinifera varieties today.

In describing the grapes, naturally we describe the types of wine that are made from each grape. These grapes can also be blending partners for other grapes, in wines made from multiple grape varieties. Turn to Chapter 2 for a quick review of some of the descriptors we use in this section. Chardonnay Chardonnay is a regal grape for its role in producing the greatest dry white wines in the world — white Burgundies — and for being one of the main grapes of Champagne.

Today it also ends up in a huge amount of everyday wine. Chapter 3: Pinot Envy and Other Secrets about Grape Varieties Because the flavors of Chardonnay are very compatible with those of oak — and because white Burgundy the great prototype is generally an oaked wine, and because many wine drinkers love the flavor of oak — most Chardonnay wine receives some oak treatment either during or after fermentation.

For the best Chardonnays, oak treatment means expensive barrels of French oak; but for lower-priced Chardonnays it could mean soaking oak chips in the wine or even adding liquid essence of oak. See Chapter 5 for more on oak. Oaked Chardonnay is so common that some wine drinkers confuse the flavor of oak with the flavor of Chardonnay. Chardonnay itself has fruity aromas and flavors that range from apple — in cooler wine regions — to tropical fruits, especially pineapple, in warmer regions.

Anyway, who can even tell, behind all that oak? Riesling The great Riesling wines of Germany have put the Riesling grape on the charts as an undisputedly noble variety. Riesling shows its real class only in a few places outside of Germany, however. Riesling wines are far less popular today than Chardonnay. While Chardonnay is usually gussied up with oak, Riesling almost never is; while Chardonnay can be full-bodied and rich, Riesling is more often light-bodied, crisp, and refreshing.

Riesling can be vinified either way, according to the style of wine a producer wants to make. Look for the word trocken meaning dry on German Riesling labels and the word dry on American labels if you prefer the dry style of Riesling. Riesling wines are sometimes labeled as White Riesling or Johannisberg Riesling — both synonyms for the noble Riesling grape. With wines from Eastern European countries, though, read the fine print: Olazrizling, Laskirizling, and Welschriesling are from another grape altogether.

If you consider yourself a maverick who hates to follow trends, check out the Riesling section of your wine shop instead of the Chardonnay aisle. Sauvignon Blanc Sauvignon Blanc is a white variety with a very distinctive character.

Besides herbaceous character sometimes referred to as grassy , Sauvignon Blanc wines display mineral aromas and flavors, vegetal character, or — in certain climates — fruity character, such as ripe melon, figs, or passion fruit. The wines are light- to medium-bodied and usually dry. Most of them are unoaked, but some are oaky. Pinot Gris is believed to have mutated from the black Pinot Noir grape. Pinot Gris wines are medium- to full-bodied, usually not oaky, and have rather low acidity and fairly neutral aromas.

Sometimes the flavor and aroma can suggest the skins of fruit, such as peach skins or orange rind. The only region in France where Pinot Gris is important is in Alsace, where it really struts its stuff.

Oregon has had good success with Pinot Gris, and more and more winemakers in California are now taking a shot at it.

It makes mediumbodied, crisp, appley-tasting, usually unoaked white wines whose high glycerin gives them silky texture. The best wines have high acidity and a fascinating oily texture they feel rather viscous in your mouth. Some good dry Chenin Blanc comes from California, but so does a ton of ordinary off-dry wine. A commercial style of U. Extremely pretty floral aromas. In Alsace and Austria, makes a dry wine, and in lots of places southern France, southern Italy, Australia makes a delicious, sweet dessert wine through the addition of alcohol.

Pinot Blanc Fairly neutral in aroma and flavors, yet can make characterful wines. High acidity and low sugar levels translate into dry, crisp, medium-bodied wines. Alsace, Austria, northern Italy, and Germany are the main production zones.

Cabernet Sauvignon wines come in all price and quality levels. The leastexpensive versions are usually fairly soft and very fruity, with medium body.

The best wines are rich and firm with great depth and classic Cabernet flavor. Serious Cabernet Sauvignons can age for 15 years or more.

Because Cabernet Sauvignon is fairly tannic and because of the blending precedent in Bordeaux , winemakers often blend it with other grapes; usually Merlot — being less tannic — is considered an ideal partner.

The prototype for Pinot Noir wine is red Burgundy, from France, where tiny vineyard plots yield rare treasures of wine made entirely from Pinot Noir. Pinot Noir wine is lighter in color than Cabernet or Merlot. It has relatively high alcohol, medium-to-high acidity, and medium-to-low tannin although oak barrels can contribute additional tannin to the wine. Pinot Noir is rarely blended with other grapes.

Turn to Chapter 12 for more on Shiraz. Chapter 3: Pinot Envy and Other Secrets about Grape Varieties Zinfandel White Zinfandel is such a popular wine — and so much better known than the red style of Zinfandel — that its fans might argue that Zinfandel is a white grape.

Zin — as lovers of red Zinfandel call it — makes rich, dark wines that are high in alcohol and medium to high in tannin. They can have a blackberry or raspberry aroma and flavor, a spicy or tarry character, or even a jammy flavor.

You can tell which is which by the price. But the extraordinary quality of Barolo and Barbaresco, two Piedmont wines, prove what greatness it can achieve under the right conditions. The Nebbiolo grape is high in both tannin and acid, which can make a wine tough. Fortunately, it also gives enough alcohol to soften the package. Its color can be deep when the wine is young but can develop orangey tinges within a few years. Its complex aroma is fruity strawberry, cherry , earthy and woodsy tar, truffles , herbal mint, eucalyptus, anise , and floral roses.

The aromas and flavors of the wines are fruity — especially cherry, often tart cherry — with floral nuances of violets and sometimes a slightly nutty character.

When fully ripe, it can give big, fruity wines with refreshing crispness. Many producers age the wine in new oak to increase the tannin level of their wine. Cabernet Franc A parent of Cabernet Sauvignon, and often blended with it to make Bordeaux-style wines.

Ripens earlier, and has more expressive, fruitier flavor especially berries , as well as less tannin. A specialty of the Loire Valley in France, where it makes wines with place-names such as Chinon and Bourgeuil. Gamay Excels in the Beaujolais district of France.

In the right circumstances, it can make deeply colored wines with velvety texture and fruity aromas and flavors suggestive of raspberries. Never before have we seen such an astounding proliferation of wine labels!

Since about , it seems that new brands of wine have appeared out of the blue every week. One sure way to become more comfortable when confronted by shelf upon shelf of unfamiliar wine labels is to learn how to decode the information on those labels. The Wine Name Game All sorts of names appear on wine labels. Is it a grape?

Most of the wines that you find in your wine shop or on restaurant wine lists are named in one of two basic ways: either for their grape variety or for the place where the grapes grew.

That information, plus the name of the producer, becomes the shorthand name we use in talking about the wine. Fontodi Chianti Classico is a wine made by the Fontodi winery and named after the place called Chianti Classico.

In Oregon, the minimum is 90 percent except for Cabernet, which can be 75 percent. And in the countries that form the European Union EU , the minimum is 85 percent.

Some varietal wines are made entirely from the grape variety for which the wine is named. All you know is that the wine contains at least the minimum legal percentage of the named variety.

Hello, my name is Bordeaux Unlike American wines, most European wines are named for the region where their grapes grow rather than for the grape variety itself. Instead, the labels say Burgundy, Bordeaux, Sancerre, and so on: the place where those grapes grow. Au contraire! The only catch is that to harvest this information, you have to learn something about the different regions from which the wines come. Turn to Chapters 9 through 15 for some of that information.

Why name a wine after a place? Grapes, the raw material of wine, have to grow somewhere. Depending on the type of soil, the amount of sunshine, the amount of rain, the slope of the hill, and the many other characteristics that each somewhere has, the grapes will turn out differently. If the grapes are different, the wine is different. Each wine, therefore, reflects the place where its grapes grow.

Therefore, the name of a place where grapes are grown in Europe automatically connotes the grape or grapes used to make the wine of that place. Which brings us back to our original question: Is this some kind of nefarious plot to make wine incomprehensible to non-Europeans?

The terroir game Terroir pronounced ter wahr is a French word that has no direct translation in English, so wine people just use the French word, for expediency not for snobbery.

Therefore, the most accurate name that a wine can have is the name of the place where its grapes grew. Place-names on American wine labels France may have invented the concept that wines should be named after their place of origin, but neither France nor even greater Europe has a monopoly on the idea.

Wine labels from non-European countries also tell you where a wine comes from — usually by featuring the name of a place somewhere on the label.

But a few differences exist between the European and non-European systems. First of all, on an American wine label or an Australian, Chilean or South African label, for that matter you have to go to some effort to find the place-name on the label.

The place of origin is not the fundamental name of the wine as it is for most European wines ; the grape usually is. Second, place-names in the United States mean far less than they do in Europe. But legally, the name Napa Valley means only that at least 85 percent of the grapes came from an area defined by law as the Napa Valley wine zone.

The name Napa Valley does not define the type of wine, nor does it imply specific grape varieties, the way a European place-name does.

Good thing the grape name is there, as big as day, on the label. Place-names on labels of non-European wines, for the most part, merely pay lip service to the concept of terroir.

In fact, some non-European wine origins are ridiculously broad. This label says that this wine comes from a specific area that is 30 percent larger than the entire country of Italy! Some specific area! Italy has more than specific wine zones. Chapter 4: Wine Names and Label Lingo When the place on the label is merely California, in fact, that information tells you next to nothing about where the grapes grew. Same thing for all those Australian wines labeled South Eastern Australia — an area only slightly smaller than France and Spain combined.

Wines named in other ways Now and then, you may come across a wine that is named for neither its grape variety nor its region of origin. Such wines usually fall into three categories: branded wines, wines with proprietary names, or generic wines. Branded wines Most wines have brand names, including those wines that are named after their grape variety — like Cakebread brand name Sauvignon Blanc grape — and those that are named after their region of origin — like Masi brand name Valpolicella place.

These brand names are usually the name of the company that made the wine, called a winery. Because most wineries make several different wines, the brand name itself is not specific enough to be the actual name of the wine. But sometimes a wine has only a brand name. For example, the label says Salamandre and red French wine but provides little other identification. Wines that have only a brand name on them, with no indication of grape or of place — other than the country of production — are generally the most inexpensive, ordinary wines you can get.

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For general information on our other products and services, please contact our Customer Care Department within the U. For technical support, please visit www. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

They have since coauthored six wine books in the Wine For Dummies series including two of their favorites, French Wine For Dummies and Italian Wine For Dummies as well as their latest book, Wine Style Wiley ; taught hundreds of wine classes together; visited nearly every wine region in the world; run five marathons; and raised eleven cats.

Along the way, they have amassed more than half a century of professional wine experience between them. Mary is president of International Wine Center, a New York City wine school that offers credentialed wine education for wine professionals and serious wine lovers. She is also the long-standing wine columnist of the NY Daily News. He taught high school English in another life, while working part-time in wine shops to satisfy his passion for wine and to subsidize his growing wine cellar.

Mary offers special thanks to Linda Lawry and everyone else at International Wine Center, who enabled her to have the time and the peace of mind to work on this book. Thanks also to Elise McCarthy, E. Is it a place? We love the way it tastes, we love the fascinating variety of wines in the world, and we love the way wine brings people together at the dinner table. We believe that you and everyone else should be able to enjoy wine — regardless of your experience or your budget.

You have to know strange names of grape varieties and foreign wine regions. You even need a special tool to open the bottle once you get it home!

All this complication surrounding wine will never go away, because wine is a very rich and complex field. With the right attitude and a little understanding of what wine is, you can begin to buy and enjoy wine. And if, like us, you decide that wine is fascinating, you can find out more and turn it into a wonderful hobby. Because we hate to think that wine, which has brought so much pleasure into our lives, could be the source of anxiety for anyone, we want to help you feel more comfortable around wine.

Find out how to handle snooty wine clerks, restaurant wine lists, and those stubborn corks. In addition, we show you how to decipher cryptic wine labels. We tell you how to describe and rate wines you taste, and how to pair food and wine. We also tell you how to store wine properly, and how to pursue your love and knowledge of wine beyond this book. You can also consult our vintage chart to check out the quality and drinkability of your wine. Where you see him, feel free to skip over the technical information that follows.

Wine will still taste just as delicious. This symbol warns you about common pitfalls. Some issues in wine are so fundamental that they bear repeating. Wine snobs practice all sorts of affectations designed to make other wine drinkers feel inferior. And you can learn how to impersonate a wine snob! To our tastes, the wines we mark with this icon are bargains because we like them, we believe them to be of good quality, and their price is low compared to other wines of similar type, style, or quality.

We mark such wines with this icon, and hope that your search proves fruitful. We start slowly so that you can enjoy the scenery along the way. Been there, done that ourselves. But familiarity with certain aspects of wine can make choosing wines a lot easier, enhance your enjoyment of wine, and increase your comfort level. You can learn as much or as little as you like.

The journey begins here. How Wine Happens Wine is, essentially, nothing but liquid, fermented fruit. The recipe for turning fruit into wine goes something like this: 1. Pick a large quantity of ripe grapes from grapevines. You could substitute raspberries or any other fruit, but Crush the grapes somehow to release their juice. Once upon a time, feet performed this step. In its most basic form, winemaking is that simple. When the yeasts are done working, your grape juice is wine.

The sugar that was in the juice is no longer there — alcohol is present instead. The riper and sweeter the grapes, the more alcohol the wine will have. This process is called fermentation. What could be more natural? Fermentation occurs in fresh apple cider left too long in your refrigerator, without any help from you. In fact we read that milk, which contains a different sort of sugar than grapes do, develops a small amount of alcohol if left on the kitchen table all day long.

Speaking of milk, Louis Pasteur is the man credited with discovering fermentation in the nineteenth century. Some of those apples in the Garden of Eden probably fermented long before Pasteur came along. The men and women who make wine can control the type of container they use for the fermentation process stainless steel and oak are the two main materials , as well as the size of the container and the temperature of the juice during fermentation — and every one of these choices can make a big difference in the taste of the wine.

After fermentation, they can choose how long to let the wine mature a stage when the wine sort of gets its act together and in what kind of container.

Fermentation can last three days or three months, and the wine can then mature for a couple of weeks or a couple of years or anything in between.

The main ingredient Obviously, one of the biggest factors in making one wine different from the next is the nature of the raw material, the grape juice. Besides the fact that riper, sweeter grapes make a more alcoholic wine, different varieties of grapes Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, or Merlot, for example make different Chapter 1: Wine wines.

Grapes are the main ingredient in wine, and everything the winemaker does, he does to the particular grape juice he has. Chapter 3 covers specific grapes and the kinds of wine they make. Where they grow — the soil and climate of each wine region, as well as the traditions and goals of the people who grow the grapes and make the wine — affects the nature of the ripe grapes, and the taste of the wine made from those grapes.

The second way a wine can become white is a little more complicated. The process involves using red grapes — but only the juice of red grapes, not the grape skins. The juice of most red grapes has no red pigmentation — only the skins do — and so a wine made with only the juice of red grapes can be a 11 12 Part I: Getting to Know Wine white wine.

In practice, though, very few white wines come from red grapes. Champagne is one exception; Chapter 14 addresses the use of red grapes to make Champagne. Is white always right? You can drink white wine anytime you like — which for most people means as a drink without food or with lighter foods. Chapter 19 covers the dynamics of pairing wines with food. The skinny on sulfites Sulfur dioxide, a compound formed from sulfur and oxygen, occurs naturally during fermentation in very small quantities.

Winemakers add it, too. Sulfur dioxide is to wine what aspirin and vitamin E are to humans — a wonder drug that cures all sorts of afflictions and prevents others.

Most Chardonnays and many French wines — like many of those from the Burgundy region of France — fall into this group. We serve white wines cool, but not ice-cold. Sometimes restaurants serve white wines too cold, and we actually have to wait a while for the wine to warm up before we drink it.

In Chapter 8, we recommend specific serving temperatures for various types of wine. Red, red wine In this case, the name is correct. Red wines really are red. Red wines are made from grapes that are red or bluish in color. So guess what wine people call these grapes?

Red wines vary quite a lot in style. This is partly because winemakers have so many ways of adjusting their red-winemaking to achieve the kind of wine they want.

For example, if winemakers leave the juice in contact with the skins for a long time, the wine becomes more tannic firmer in the mouth, like strong tea; tannic wines can make you pucker.

If winemakers drain the juice off the skins sooner, the wine is softer and less tannic. Usually, they blame the sulfites in the wine. Red wines do contain histamine-like compounds and other substances derived from the grape skins that could be the culprits. Red wine tends to be consumed more often as part of a meal than as a drink on its own.

Thanks to the wide range of red wine styles, you can find red wines to go with just about every type of food and every occasion when you want to drink wine except the times when you want to drink a wine with bubbles, because most bubbly wines are white or pink.

On the other hand, many restaurants serve red wines too warm. Where do they store them? Next to the boiler? For more about serving wine at the right temperature, see Chapter 8. That would be too simple. But even a child can see that White Zinfandel is really pink. Which type when? Choosing a color usually is the starting point for selecting a specific wine in a wine shop or in a restaurant. As we explain in Chapters 6 and 7, most stores and most restaurant wine lists arrange wines by color before making other distinctions, such as grape varieties, wine regions, or taste categories.

Although certain foods can straddle the line between white wine and red wine compatibility — grilled salmon, for example, can be delicious with a rich white wine or a fruity red — your preference for red, white, or pink wine will often be your first consideration in pairing wine with food, too. Pairing food and wine is one of the most fun aspects of wine, because the possible combinations are almost limitless.

We get you started with the pairing principles and a few specific suggestions in Chapter Best of all, your personal taste rules! Our own answer is always Champagne, with a capital C more on the capitalization later in this section. We welcome guests with it, we celebrate with it after our team wins a Sunday football game, and we toast our cats with it on their birthdays.

What we drink every night is regular wine — red, white, or pink — without bubbles. There are various names for these wines. When a red wine just seems too heavy 3. With lunch — hamburgers, grilled cheese sandwiches, and so on 4.

On picnics on warm, sunny days 5. On warm evenings 7. To celebrate the arrival of spring or summer 8. With ham hot or cold or other pork dishes 9. When you feel like putting ice cubes in your wine Table wine Table wine, or light wine, is fermented grape juice whose alcohol content falls within a certain range.

Furthermore, table wine is not bubbly. Some table wines have a very slight carbonation, but not enough to disqualify them as table wines. According to U. The use of gonzo yeast strains that continue working even when the alcohol exceeds 14 percent is another factor. Dessert wine Many wines have more than 14 percent alcohol because the winemaker added alcohol during or after the fermentation.

But until we get elected to run things, the term will have to be dessert wine or liqueur wine. It can be expressed in degrees, like The labels are allowed to lie.

If the label states The leeway does not entitle the wineries to exceed the 14 percent maximum, however. Chapter 1: Wine Sparkling wine and a highly personal spelling lesson Sparkling wines are wines that contain carbon dioxide bubbles. Carbon dioxide gas is a natural byproduct of fermentation, and winemakers sometimes decide to trap it in the wine. Just about every country that makes wine also makes sparkling wine.

In Chapter 14, we discuss how sparkling wine is made and describe the major sparkling wines of the world. In the United States, Canada, and Europe, sparkling wine is the official name for the category of wines with bubbles.

It is the undisputed Grand Champion of Bubblies. Unfortunately for the people of Champagne, France, their wine is so famous that the name champagne has been borrowed again and again by producers elsewhere, until the word has become synonymous with practically the whole category of sparkling wines.

The French are that serious. To us, this seems perfectly fair. We have too much respect for the people and the traditions of Champagne, France, where the best sparkling wines in the world are made. Those are the wines we want on our desert island, not just any sparkling wine from anywhere that calls itself champagne.

I do it every day, three to five times a day. All that wine-tasting humbug is just another way of making wine complicated. Anyone who can taste coffee or a hamburger can taste wine. All you need are a nose, taste buds, and a brain. You also have all that it takes to speak Mandarin. Having the ability to do something is different from knowing how to do it and applying that know-how in everyday life, however.

The Special Technique for Tasting Wine You drink beverages every day, tasting them as they pass through your mouth.

In the case of wine, however, drinking and tasting are not synonymous. But if you taste wine, you can discover its nuances.

In fact, the more slowly and attentively you taste wine, the more interesting it tastes. And with that, we have the two fundamental rules of wine tasting: 1. Slow down. Pay attention. First you look at the wine, and then you smell it. Stick your nose right into the airspace of the glass where the aromas are captured. Smell every ingredient when you cook, everything you eat, the fresh fruits and vegetables you buy at the supermarket, even the smells of your environment — like leather, wet earth, fresh road tar, grass, flowers, your wet dog, shoe polish, and your medicine cabinet.

Also notice whether the wine is cloudy, clear, or brilliant. Most wines are clear. Some wines form legs or tears that flow slowly down. Once upon a time, these legs were interpreted as the sure sign of a rich, high-quality wine. The nose knows Now we get to the really fun part of tasting wine: swirling and sniffing. This is when you can let your imagination run wild, and no one will ever dare to contradict you.

To get the most out of your sniffing, swirl the wine in the glass first. Keep your glass on the table and rotate it three or four times so that the wine swirls around inside the glass and mixes with air.

Then quickly bring the glass to your nose. Stick your nose into the airspace of the glass, and smell the wine. Is the aroma fruity, woodsy, fresh, cooked, intense, light? Your nose tires quickly, but it recovers quickly, too. Wait just a moment and try again. If someone says that a wine has a huge nose, he means that the wine has a very strong smell. If he says that he detects lemon in the nose or on the nose, he means that the wine smells a bit like lemons. In fact, most wine tasters rarely use the word smell to describe how a wine smells because the word smell like the word odor seems pejorative.

Sometimes they use the word bouquet, although that word is falling out of fashion. Just as a wine taster might use the term nose for the smell of a wine, he might use the word palate in referring to the taste of a wine. As you swirl, the aromas in the wine vaporize, so that you can smell them. Wine has so many aromatic compounds that whatever you find in the smell of a wine is probably not merely a figment of your imagination.

The point behind this whole ritual of swirling and sniffing is that what you smell should be pleasurable to you, maybe even fascinating, and that you should have fun in the process. Of course you do! And when you do catch the wine bug, you may discover that those aromas, in the right wine, can really be a kick. Then there are the bad smells that nobody will try to defend.

Often when a wine is seriously flawed, it shows immediately in the nose of the wine. Wine judges have a term for such wines. Just rack it up to experience and open a different bottle. Smelling wine is really just a matter of practice and attention. This is when grown men and women sit around and make strange faces, gurgling the wine and sloshing it around in their mouths with looks of intense concentration in their eyes. You can make an enemy for life if you distract a wine taster just at the moment when he is focusing all his energy on the last few drops of a special wine.

Take a medium-sized sip of wine. Hold it in your mouth, purse your lips, and draw in some air across your tongue, over the wine. Then swish the wine around in your mouth as if you are chewing it.

Then swallow it. The whole process should take several seconds, depending on how much you are concentrating on the wine. Wondering what to concentrate on? These include sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami, a savory characteristic. Of these tastes, sweetness, sourness, and bitterness are those most commonly found in wine. As you swish the wine around in your mouth, you are also buying time. Your brain needs a few seconds to figure out what the tongue is tasting and make some sense of it.

Any sweetness in the wine registers in your brain first because many of the taste buds on the front of your tongue — where the wine hits first — capture the sensation of sweetness; acidity which, by the way, is what normal people call sourness and bitterness register subsequently.

Parlez-Vous Winespeak? Now we have to confess that there is one step between knowing how to taste wine and always drinking wine that you like. That step is putting taste into words. But most of the time you have to buy the stuff without tasting it first. Naturally, it helps if we all speak the same language. In case you really want to get into this wine thing, we treat you to some sophisticated wine language in Chapters 5 and For now, a few basic words and concepts should do the trick.

Sweetness As soon as you put the wine into your mouth, you can usually notice sweetness or the lack of it. In Winespeak, dry is the opposite of sweet. Acidity All wine contains acid mainly tartaric acid, which exists in grapes , but some wines are more acidic than others. Acidity is more of a taste factor in white wines than in reds. White wines with a high amount of acidity feel crisp, and those without enough acidity feel flabby. You generally perceive acidity in the middle of your mouth — what winetasters call the mid-palate.

Is it sweetness or fruitiness? Beginning wine tasters sometimes describe dry wines as sweet because they confuse fruitiness with sweetness. A wine is fruity when it has distinct aromas and flavors of fruit. Sweetness, on the other hand, is a tactile impression on your tongue. Chapter 2: These Taste Buds Are for You Touchy-feely Softness and firmness are actually textural impressions a wine gives you as you taste it.

Unfermented sugar also contributes to an impression of softness, and alcohol can, too. But very high alcohol — which is fairly common in wines these days — can give a wine an edge of hardness. To generalize a bit, tannin is to a red wine what acidity is to a white: a backbone. Tannins alone can taste bitter, but some tannins in wine are less bitter than others.

You sense tannin — as bitterness, or as firmness or richness of texture — mainly in the rear of your mouth and, if the amount of tannin in a wine is high, on the inside of your cheeks and on your gums. Depending on the amount and nature of its tannin, you can describe a red wine as astringent, firm, or soft. But some wines seem fuller, bigger, or heavier in the mouth than others.

Imagine that your tongue is a tiny scale and judge how much the wine is weighing it down. Classify the wine as light-bodied, medium-bodied, or full-bodied. Red wines have acid as well as tannin, and distinguishing between the two as you taste a wine can be a real challenge. Acid makes you salivate saliva is alkaline, and it flows to neutralize the acid. Tannin leaves your mouth dry. Instead, you should refer to families of flavors in wine.

You have your fruity wines the ones that make you think of all sorts of fruit when you smell them or taste them , your earthy wines these make you think of minerals and rocks, walks in the forest, turning the earth in your garden, dry leaves, and so on , your spicy wines cinnamon, cloves, black pepper, or Indian spices, for example , your herbal wines mint, grass, hay, rosemary, and so on , and so on, and so on. There are so many flavors in wine that we could go on and on and we often do!

Some wines are as flavorful as a Big Mac, while others have flavors as subtle as fillet of sole. Flavor intensity is a major factor in pairing wine with food, as you can read in Chapter 19, and it also helps determine how much you like a wine.

Turn to Chapter 19 for more about expert opinion. A good wine is, above all, a wine that you like enough to drink — because the whole purpose of a wine is to give pleasure to those who drink it.

After that, how good a wine is depends on how it measures up to a set of more or less agreed-upon standards of performance established by experienced, trained experts. None of these concepts is objectively measurable, by the way. The fourth is alcohol. Besides being one of the reasons we usually want to drink a glass of wine in the first place, alcohol is an important element of wine quality. Balance is the relationship of these four components to one another. A wine is balanced when nothing sticks out as you taste it, like harsh tannin or too much sweetness.

Most wines are balanced to most people. But if you have any pet peeves about food — if you really hate anything tart, for example, or if you never eat sweets — you may perceive some wines to be unbalanced. If you perceive them to be unbalanced, then they are unbalanced for you. Professional tasters know their own idiosyncrasies and adjust for them when they judge wine. The perception of the basic tastes on the tongue varies from one person to the next.

Research has proven that some people have more taste buds than others, and are therefore more sensitive to characteristics such as sourness or bitterness in food and beverages. If you find diet sodas very bitter, or if you need to add a lot of sugar to your coffee to make it palatable, you may fall into this category — and you therefore may find many red wines unpleasant, even if other people consider them great.

Length is a word used to describe a wine that gives an impression of going all the way on the palate — you can taste it across the full length of your tongue — rather than stopping short halfway through your tasting of it. They are short. Generally, high alcohol or excess tannin is to blame. Length is a sure sign of high quality. Depth This is another subjective, unmeasurable attribute of a high-quality wine. We say a wine has depth when it seems to have a dimension of verticality — that is, it does not taste flat and one-dimensional in your mouth.

But a wine that keeps revealing different things about itself, always showing you a new flavor or impression — a wine that has complexity — is usually considered better quality. Some experts use the term complexity specifically to indicate that a wine has a multiplicity of aromas and flavors, while others use it in a more holistic but less precise sense, to refer to the total impression a wine gives you. Chapter 2: These Taste Buds Are for You Balance in action For firsthand experience of how the principle of taste balance works, try this.

Now add a lot of sugar to the tea. The sweetness should counter-balance the acid—tannin impact, and the tea will taste softer than it did before.

And many of the wines we could call bad are actually just bad bottles of wine — bottles that were handled badly, so that the good wine inside them got ruined. We hope you never meet one. That same taste of rot can be in a wine if the wine was made from grapes that were not completely fresh and healthy when they were harvested. Bad wine. Most wines today remain forever in the wine stage because of technology or careful winemaking.

Bad wines. It may have been a good wine once, but air — oxygen — got in somehow and killed the wine. Bad bottle. Unfortunately, every other bottle of that wine that experienced the same shipping or storage will also be bad.

Change the channel. Gazing across manicured rows of grapevines in Napa Valley or pondering craggy terraces of rugged hillside vines in Portugal inspires us — and reinforces for us the fact that wine is an agricultural product, born of the earth, the grapevine, and the hard work of humans. Literally and emotionally, grapes are the link between the land and the wine. Grapes also happen to give us one of the easiest ways of classifying wine and making sense of the hundreds of different types of wine that exist.

Why Grapes Matter Grapes are the starting point of every wine, and therefore they are largely responsible for the style and personality of each wine. The grapes that make a particular wine dictate the genetic structure of that wine and how it will respond to everything that the winemaker does to it. Think back to the last wine you drank. What color was it? Did it smell herbal or earthy or fruity? Whichever, those aromas came mainly from the grapes. Was it firm and tannic or soft and voluptuous?

Thank the grapes — with a nod to Mother Nature and the winemaker. So can winemaking processes such as oak aging see Chapter 5. Each grape variety reacts in its own way to the farming and winemaking techniques that it faces. Of genus and species By grape variety, we mean the fruit of a specific type of grapevine: the fruit of the Cabernet Sauvignon vine, for example, or of the Chardonnay vine.

The term variety actually has specific meaning in scientific circles. A variety is a subdivision of a species. This species originated in Europe and western Asia; other distinct species of Vitis are native to North America. Grapes of other species can also make wine; for example, the Concord grape, which makes Concord wine as well as grape juice and jelly, belongs to the native American species Vitis labrusca.

But the grapes of this species have a very different flavor from vinifera grapes — foxy is the word used to describe that taste. The number of non-vinifera wines is small because their flavor is less popular in wine.

To this day, no remedy has been found to protect vinifera roots from phylloxera. What saved the species was grafting vinifera vines onto rootstocks of native American species that are resistant to the bug.

The practice of grafting the fruit-bearing part of Vitis vinifera onto the rooting part of other, phylloxera-resistant species continues today everywhere in the world where phylloxera is present and fine wine is made. The fruit-bearing part is called a scion, and the rooting plant is called a rootstock. Miraculously, each grape variety maintains its own character despite the fact that its roots are alien. How grapes vary All sorts of attributes distinguish each grape variety from the next.

These attributes fall into two categories: personality traits and performance factors. Personality traits are the characteristics of the fruit itself — its flavors, for example. Performance factors refer to how the grapevine grows, how its fruit ripens, and how quickly it can get from 0 to 60 miles per hour.

In red grape varieties, the tannin in the skins, stems, and pips becomes richer and less astringent. The stage of ripeness that the grapes attain is a big factor in the style of the wine. The composite personality traits of any grape variety are fairly evident in wines made from that grape. Performance factors of grape varieties The performance factors that distinguish grape varieties are vitally important to the grape grower because those factors determine how easy or challenging it will be for him to cultivate a specific variety in his vineyard — if he can even grow it at all.

In regions with short growing seasons, early-ripening varieties do best. In warm, damp climates, grape varieties with dense bunches can have mildew problems. In any case, no two vineyards in the world have precisely the same combination of these factors — precisely the same terroir see Chapter 4.

The issue simply defies simple generalizations. Chapter 3: Pinot Envy and Other Secrets about Grape Varieties Grape royalty and commoners Bees have their queens, gorillas have their silverbacks, and humans have their royal families.

In the grape kingdom, there are nobles, too — at least as interpreted by the human beings who drink the wine made from those grapes. Noble grape varieties as wine people call them have the potential to make great — not just good — wine. The wines made from noble grapes on their home turf can be so great that they inspire winemakers in far-flung regions to grow the same grape in their own vineyards.

The noble grape might prove itself noble there, too — but frequently the grape does not. One important factor in how a grape variety performs is the soil in the vineyard.

Over the centuries, some classic compatibilities between grape varieties and types of soil have become evident: Chardonnay in limestone or chalk, Cabernet Sauvignon in gravelly soil, Pinot Noir in limestone, and Riesling in slatey soil. At any rate, these are the soils of the regions where these grape varieties perform at their legendary best. The wisdom of the ages dictates that the grapevine must struggle to produce the best grapes, and well-drained, less fertile soils challenge the vine to struggle, regardless of what variety the grapevine is.

Has the Brave New World of grape growing arrived? Not really. In botanical terms, a clone is a subdivision of a variety. Within a single variety, such as Chardonnay, differences can exist from one plant to the next. Some vines might ripen their fruit slightly more quickly, for example, or produce grapes with slightly different aromas and flavors than the next vine. The new plants are genetically identical to the mother plant. Increasingly, growers plant their vineyards with several different clones to foster complexity.

Nurseries propagate grapevines asexually, by taking cuttings from a mother plant and allowing A Primer on White Grape Varieties This section includes descriptions of the 12 most important white vinifera varieties today.

Riesling The great Riesling wines of Germany have put the Riesling grape on the charts as an undisputedly noble variety. Riesling shows its real class only in a few places outside of Germany, however. Riesling wines are far less popular today than Chardonnay. While Chardonnay is usually gussied up with oak, Riesling almost never is; while Chardonnay can be full-bodied and rich, Riesling is more often light-bodied, crisp, and refreshing.

Alsace, Austria, northern Italy, and Germany are the main production zones. A major grape in Australia, and southwestern France, including Bordeaux where it is the key player in the dessert wine, Sauternes. Floral aroma, delicately apricot-like, medium- to full-bodied with low acidity. See Chapter 4 for a chart listing the grape varieties of major place-name wines.

The Cabernet Sauvignon grape makes wines that are high in tannin and are medium- to full-bodied. Cabernet Sauvignon wines come in all price and quality levels. The leastexpensive versions are usually fairly soft and very fruity, with medium body. The best wines are rich and firm with great depth and classic Cabernet flavor.

Serious Cabernet Sauvignons can age for 15 years or more. Because Cabernet Sauvignon is fairly tannic and because of the blending precedent in Bordeaux , winemakers often blend it with other grapes; usually Merlot — being less tannic — is considered an ideal partner. Australian winemakers have an unusual practice of blending Cabernet Sauvignon with Syrah.

More on that in Chapter Merlot Deep color, full body, high alcohol, and low tannin are the characteristics of wines made from the Merlot grape.

The aromas and flavors can be plummy or sometimes chocolatey, or they can suggest tea leaves. Merlot makes both inexpensive, simple wines and, when grown in the right conditions, very serious wines. But a great Pinot Noir can be one of the greatest wines ever. The prototype for Pinot Noir wine is red Burgundy, from France, where tiny vineyard plots yield rare treasures of wine made entirely from Pinot Noir.

Pinot Noir wine is lighter in color than Cabernet or Merlot. It has relatively high alcohol, medium-to-high acidity, and medium-to-low tannin although oak barrels can contribute additional tannin to the wine. Pinot Noir is rarely blended with other grapes. Turn to Chapter 12 for more on Shiraz. Chapter 3: Pinot Envy and Other Secrets about Grape Varieties Zinfandel White Zinfandel is such a popular wine — and so much better known than the red style of Zinfandel — that its fans might argue that Zinfandel is a white grape.

Zinfandel is one of the oldest grapes in California, and it therefore enjoys a certain stature there. Its aura is enhanced by its mysterious history: Although Zinfandel is clearly a vinifera grape, for decades authorities were uncertain of its origins. Zin — as lovers of red Zinfandel call it — makes rich, dark wines that are high in alcohol and medium to high in tannin.

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ПООБЕДАЕМ У АЛЬФРЕДА. В 8 ВЕЧЕРА. В другом конце комнаты Хейл еле слышно засмеялся. Сьюзан взглянула на адресную строку сообщения. FROM: CHALECRYPTO.

WebWine for dummies Item Preview remove-circle Share or Embed This Item. Share to . AdMorebeer! Offers The Largest Selection Of Brewing Supplies To Home Brewers Across The USA. Choose From Over Types Of Hops, Types Of Grains, And Beer Recipe Kits. WebNov 13, · In Wine For Dummies, the authors—both recognized wine authorities and . WebIn Wine For Dummies, the authors—both recognized wine authorities and accredited .

Кому вы его продали. Тучный немец в полном недоумении сидел на кровати. Надежды на романтический вечер рушились по downlpad причине. – Was passiert? – нервно спросил.

– Что происходит.

Почему вы не дождались полицейских. И не отдали кольцо. – Мне много чего нужно, мистер Беккер, но неприятности точно не нужны.

Погрузив ладони в складки жира на плечах шефа, она медленно двигалась вниз, к полотенцу, прикрывавшему нижнюю часть его спины. Ее руки спускались все ниже, забираясь под полотенце.

Нуматака почти ничего не замечал. Мысли его были .

We discuss those wines in Chapter Dessert wine is the legal U. We find that term misleading, because dessert wines are not always sweet and not always consumed after dinner.

In Europe, this category of wines is called liqueur wines, which carries the same connotation of sweetness. We prefer the term fortified, which suggests that the wine has been strengthened with additional alcohol.

But until we get elected to run things, the term will have to be dessert wine or liqueur wine. It can be expressed in degrees, like The labels are allowed to lie. If the label states The leeway does not entitle the wineries to exceed the 14 percent maximum, however.

Chapter 1: Wine Sparkling wine and a highly personal spelling lesson Sparkling wines are wines that contain carbon dioxide bubbles. Carbon dioxide gas is a natural byproduct of fermentation, and winemakers sometimes decide to trap it in the wine. Just about every country that makes wine also makes sparkling wine. In Chapter 14, we discuss how sparkling wine is made and describe the major sparkling wines of the world.

In the United States, Canada, and Europe, sparkling wine is the official name for the category of wines with bubbles. Champagne with a capital C is the most famous sparkling wine — and probably the most famous wine, for that matter. Champagne is a specific type of sparkling wine made from certain grape varieties and produced in a certain way that comes from a region in France called Champagne.

In the case of wine, however, drinking and tasting are not synonymous. But if you taste wine, you can discover its nuances. In fact, the more slowly and attentively you taste wine, the more interesting it tastes. And with that, we have the two fundamental rules of wine tasting: 1. Slow down. Pay attention. First you look at the wine, and then you smell it. Stick your nose right into the airspace of the glass where the aromas are captured.

Smell every ingredient when you cook, everything you eat, the fresh fruits and vegetables you buy at the supermarket, even the smells of your environment — like leather, wet earth, fresh road tar, grass, flowers, your wet dog, shoe polish, and your medicine cabinet. Keeping your mouth open a bit while you inhale can help you perceive aromas. Notice how dark or how pale the wine is, what color it is, and whether the color fades from the center of the wine out toward the edge, where it touches the glass.

The nose knows Now we get to the really fun part of tasting wine: swirling and sniffing. This is when you can let your imagination run wild, and no one will ever dare to contradict you. To get the most out of your sniffing, swirl the wine in the glass first. Keep your glass on the table and rotate it three or four times so that the wine swirls around inside the glass and mixes with air.

If he says that he detects lemon in the nose or on the nose, he means that the wine smells a bit like lemons.

In fact, most wine tasters rarely use the word smell to describe how a wine smells because the word smell like the word odor seems pejorative. Sometimes they use the word bouquet, although that word is falling out of fashion. Just as a wine taster might use the term nose for the smell of a wine, he might use the word palate in referring to the taste of a wine. As you swirl, the aromas in the wine vaporize, so that you can smell them. Wine has so many aromatic compounds that whatever you find in the smell of a wine is probably not merely a figment of your imagination.

Then there are the bad smells that nobody will try to defend. Often when a wine is seriously flawed, it shows immediately in the nose of the wine. Wine judges have a term for such wines. Just rack it up to experience and open a different bottle. Smelling wine is really just a matter of practice and attention. This is when grown men and women sit around and make strange faces, gurgling the wine and sloshing it around in their mouths with looks of intense concentration in their eyes.

You can make an enemy for life if you distract a wine taster just at the moment when he is focusing all his energy on the last few drops of a special wine. Take a medium-sized sip of wine. Hold it in your mouth, purse your lips, and draw in some air across your tongue, over the wine. Then swish the wine around in your mouth as if you are chewing it. Then swallow it. The whole process should take several seconds, depending on how much you are concentrating on the wine.

Wondering what to concentrate on? These include sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami, a savory characteristic. Of these tastes, sweetness, sourness, and bitterness are those most commonly found in wine. As you swish the wine around in your mouth, you are also buying time.

Your brain needs a few seconds to figure out what the tongue is tasting and make some sense of it. Any sweetness in the wine registers in your brain first because many of the taste buds on the front of your tongue — where the wine hits first — capture the sensation of sweetness; acidity which, by the way, is what normal people call sourness and bitterness register subsequently. Where have all the wild strawberries gone? But to be perfectly correct about it, these flavors are actually aromas that you taste, not through tongue contact, but by inhaling them up an interior nasal passage in the back of your mouth called the retronasal passage see Figure When you draw in air across the wine in your mouth, you are vaporizing the aromas just as you did when you swirled the wine in your glass.

Figure Wine flavors are actually aromas that vaporize in your mouth; you perceive them through the rear nasal passage. Parlez-Vous Winespeak? Now we have to confess that there is one step between knowing how to taste wine and always drinking wine that you like. That step is putting taste into words. But most of the time you have to buy the stuff without tasting it first. Naturally, it helps if we all speak the same language. In case you really want to get into this wine thing, we treat you to some sophisticated wine language in Chapters 5 and For now, a few basic words and concepts should do the trick.

Acidity is more of a taste factor in white wines than in reds. White wines with a high amount of acidity feel crisp, and those without enough acidity feel flabby. You generally perceive acidity in the middle of your mouth — what winetasters call the mid-palate.

Because red wines are fermented with their grape skins and pips, and because red grape varieties are generally higher in tannin than white varieties, tannin levels are far higher in red wines than in white wines. Oak barrels can also contribute tannin to wines, both reds and whites. Have you ever taken a sip of a red wine and rapidly experienced a drying-out feeling in your mouth, as if something had blotted up all your saliva?

Unfermented sugar also contributes to an impression of softness, and alcohol can, too. But very high alcohol — which is fairly common in wines these days — can give a wine an edge of hardness.

To generalize a bit, tannin is to a red wine what acidity is to a white: a backbone. Tannins alone can taste bitter, but some tannins in wine are less bitter than others. You sense tannin — as bitterness, or as firmness or richness of texture — mainly in the rear of your mouth and, if the amount of tannin in a wine is high, on the inside of your cheeks and on your gums.

Red wines have acid as well as tannin, and distinguishing between the two as you taste a wine can be a real challenge. Acid makes you salivate saliva is alkaline, and it flows to neutralize the acid. Tannin leaves your mouth dry. Instead, you should refer to families of flavors in wine.

But quality wines come in all colors, degrees of sweetness and dryness, and flavor profiles. Personal taste is simply more relevant than quality in choosing a wine.

Nevertheless, degrees of quality do exist among wines. Turn to Chapter 19 for more about expert opinion. A good wine is, above all, a wine that you like enough to drink — because the whole purpose of a wine is to give pleasure to those who drink it. After that, how good a wine is depends on how it measures up to a set of more or less agreed-upon standards of performance established by experienced, trained experts. None of these concepts is objectively measurable, by the way. The fourth is alcohol.

Besides being one of the reasons we usually want to drink a glass of wine in the first place, alcohol is an important element of wine quality. Balance is the relationship of these four components to one another. A wine is balanced when nothing sticks out as you taste it, like harsh tannin or too much sweetness. Most wines are balanced to most people. But if you have any pet peeves about food — if you really hate anything tart, for example, or if you never eat sweets — you may perceive some wines to be unbalanced.

If you perceive them to be unbalanced, then they are unbalanced for you. Professional tasters know their own idiosyncrasies and adjust for them when they judge wine. The perception of the basic tastes on the tongue varies from one person to the next. Research has proven that some people have more taste buds than others, and are therefore more sensitive to characteristics such as sourness or bitterness in food and beverages. If you find diet sodas very bitter, or if you need to add a lot of sugar to your coffee to make it palatable, you may fall into this category — and you therefore may find many red wines unpleasant, even if other people consider them great.

Chapter 2: These Taste Buds Are for You Balance in action For firsthand experience of how the principle of taste balance works, try this. Make a very strong cup of tea, and chill it.

Now add lemon juice; the tea will taste astringent constricting the pores in your mouth , because the acid of the lemon and the tannin of the tea are accentuating each other. Now add a lot of sugar to the tea. The sweetness should counter-balance the acid—tannin impact, and the tea will taste softer than it did before.

Or a wine may have nothing much at all to say for itself after you swallow. Typicity In order to judge whether a wine is true to its type, you have to know how that type is supposed to taste. Turn to Chapter 3 and Chapters 9 through 15 for all those details. The fact is there are very few bad wines in the world today compared to even 20 years ago. And many of the wines we could call bad are actually just bad bottles of wine — bottles that were handled badly, so that the good wine inside them got ruined.

It may have been a good wine once, but air — oxygen — got in somehow and killed the wine. Bad bottle. Unfortunately, every other bottle of that wine that experienced the same shipping or storage will also be bad.

The grapes that make a particular wine dictate the genetic structure of that wine and how it will respond to everything that the winemaker does to it.

Think back to the last wine you drank. What color was it? Did it smell herbal or earthy or fruity? Whichever, those aromas came mainly from the grapes. Was it firm and tannic or soft and voluptuous?

Of genus and species By grape variety, we mean the fruit of a specific type of grapevine: the fruit of the Cabernet Sauvignon vine, for example, or of the Chardonnay vine. The term variety actually has specific meaning in scientific circles. A variety is a subdivision of a species. This species originated in Europe and western Asia; other distinct species of Vitis are native to North America.

Grapes of other species can also make wine; for example, the Concord grape, which makes Concord wine as well as grape juice and jelly, belongs to the native American species Vitis labrusca. But the grapes of this species have a very different flavor from vinifera grapes — foxy is the word used to describe that taste.

The number of non-vinifera wines is small because their flavor is less popular in wine. Within the genus Vitis and the species vinifera, there are as many as 10, varieties of wine grapes. If wine from every one of these varieties were commercially available and you drank the wine of a different variety every single day, it would take you more than 27 years to experience them all! Not that you would want to.

Within those 10, varieties are grapes that have the ability to make extraordinary wine, grapes that tend to make very ordinary wine, and grapes that only a parent could love. Most varieties are obscure grapes whose wines rarely enter into international commerce.

The grape varieties you might encounter in the course of your normal wine enjoyment probably number fewer than The entire species was nearly eradicated by a tiny louse called phylloxera that immigrated to Europe from America and proceeded to feast on the roots of vinifera grapevines, wiping out vineyards across the continent. To this day, no remedy has been found to protect vinifera roots from phylloxera. What saved the species was grafting vinifera vines onto rootstocks of native American species that are resistant to the bug.

Personality traits of grape varieties Skin color is the most fundamental distinction among grape varieties. A few red-skinned varieties are further distinguished by having red pulp rather than white pulp. Some grapes have very neutral aromas and flavors and, therefore, make fairly neutral wines. More tannin in the grapes translates into a firmer, more tannic red wine. As ripening progresses, they become sweeter and less acidic although they always retain some acid , and their flavors become richer and more complex.

One important factor in how a grape variety performs is the soil in the vineyard. Over the centuries, some classic compatibilities between grape varieties and types of soil have become evident: Chardonnay in limestone or chalk, Cabernet Sauvignon in gravelly soil, Pinot Noir in limestone, and Riesling in slatey soil.

Some vines might ripen their fruit slightly more quickly, for example, or produce grapes with slightly different aromas and flavors than the next vine. The new plants are genetically identical to the mother plant. Increasingly, growers plant their vineyards with several different clones to foster complexity.

Chardonnay Chardonnay is a regal grape for its role in producing the greatest dry white wines in the world — white Burgundies — and for being one of the main grapes of Champagne. Today it also ends up in a huge amount of everyday wine. Chapter 3: Pinot Envy and Other Secrets about Grape Varieties Because the flavors of Chardonnay are very compatible with those of oak — and because white Burgundy the great prototype is generally an oaked wine, and because many wine drinkers love the flavor of oak — most Chardonnay wine receives some oak treatment either during or after fermentation.

Chardonnay itself has fruity aromas and flavors that range from apple — in cooler wine regions — to tropical fruits, especially pineapple, in warmer regions. Chardonnay also can display subtle earthy aromas, such as mushroom or minerals.

Chardonnay wine has medium to high acidity and is generally full-bodied. Classically, Chardonnay wines are dry.

But most inexpensive Chardonnays these days are actually a bit sweet. Chardonnay is a grape that can stand on its own in a wine, and the top Chardonnay-based wines except for Champagne and similar bubblies are percent Chardonnay. Anyway, who can even tell, behind all that oak? Riesling The great Riesling wines of Germany have put the Riesling grape on the charts as an undisputedly noble variety.

Riesling shows its real class only in a few places outside of Germany, however. Riesling wines are far less popular today than Chardonnay. While Chardonnay is usually gussied up with oak, Riesling almost never is; while Chardonnay can be full-bodied and rich, Riesling is more often light-bodied, crisp, and refreshing.

In California, for example, some of the so-called Pinot Blanc has turned out to be another grape entirely: Melon de Bourgogne.

Knopf , an indispensable and fascinating reference. Alsace Rieslings are normally dry, many German Rieslings are fairly dry, and a few American Rieslings are dry. Riesling can be vinified either way, according to the style of wine a producer wants to make. Look for the word trocken meaning dry on German Riesling labels and the word dry on American labels if you prefer the dry style of Riesling.

Riesling wines are sometimes labeled as White Riesling or Johannisberg Riesling — both synonyms for the noble Riesling grape.

With wines from Eastern European countries, though, read the fine print: Olazrizling, Laskirizling, and Welschriesling are from another grape altogether. If you consider yourself a maverick who hates to follow trends, check out the Riesling section of your wine shop instead of the Chardonnay aisle. Sauvignon Blanc Sauvignon Blanc is a white variety with a very distinctive character.

Pinot Gris is believed to have mutated from the black Pinot Noir grape. Pinot Gris wines are medium- to full-bodied, usually not oaky, and have rather low acidity and fairly neutral aromas. Sometimes the flavor and aroma can suggest the skins of fruit, such as peach skins or orange rind. The only region in France where Pinot Gris is important is in Alsace, where it really struts its stuff.

The best wines have high acidity and a fascinating oily texture they feel rather viscous in your mouth. Some good dry Chenin Blanc comes from California, but so does a ton of ordinary off-dry wine. A commercial style of U. Extremely pretty floral aromas.

In Alsace and Austria, makes a dry wine, and in lots of places southern France, southern Italy, Australia makes a delicious, sweet dessert wine through the addition of alcohol. Pinot Blanc Fairly neutral in aroma and flavors, yet can make characterful wines.

High acidity and low sugar levels translate into dry, crisp, medium-bodied wines. Alsace, Austria, northern Italy, and Germany are the main production zones.

The best wines are rich and firm with great depth and classic Cabernet flavor. Serious Cabernet Sauvignons can age for 15 years or more. Because Cabernet Sauvignon is fairly tannic and because of the blending precedent in Bordeaux , winemakers often blend it with other grapes; usually Merlot — being less tannic — is considered an ideal partner.

But a great Pinot Noir can be one of the greatest wines ever. The prototype for Pinot Noir wine is red Burgundy, from France, where tiny vineyard plots yield rare treasures of wine made entirely from Pinot Noir.

They can have a blackberry or raspberry aroma and flavor, a spicy or tarry character, or even a jammy flavor. You can tell which is which by the price. But the extraordinary quality of Barolo and Barbaresco, two Piedmont wines, prove what greatness it can achieve under the right conditions. The Nebbiolo grape is high in both tannin and acid, which can make a wine tough. Fortunately, it also gives enough alcohol to soften the package.

Its color can be deep when the wine is young but can develop orangey tinges within a few years. Its complex aroma is fruity strawberry, cherry , earthy and woodsy tar, truffles , herbal mint, eucalyptus, anise , and floral roses. Sangiovese This Italian grape has proven itself in the Tuscany region of Italy, especially in the Brunello di Montalcino and Chianti districts. Sangiovese makes wines that are medium to high in acidity and firm in tannin; the wines can be lightbodied to full-bodied, depending on exactly where the grapes grow and how the wine is made.

The aromas and flavors of the wines are fruity — especially cherry, often tart cherry — with floral nuances of violets and sometimes a slightly nutty character. It gives wines deep color, low acidity, and only moderate alcohol.

Modern renditions of Tempranillo from the Ribera del Duero region and elsewhere in Spain prove what color and fruitiness this grape has. Other red grapes Table describes additional red grape varieties and their wines, which you can encounter either as varietal wines or as wines named for their place of production. Barbera Italian variety that, oddly for a red grape, has little tannin but very high acidity. When fully ripe, it can give big, fruity wines with refreshing crispness.

Many producers age the wine in new oak to increase the tannin level of their wine. Cabernet Franc A parent of Cabernet Sauvignon, and often blended with it to make Bordeaux-style wines. Ripens earlier, and has more expressive, fruitier flavor especially berries , as well as less tannin.

A specialty of the Loire Valley in France, where it makes wines with place-names such as Chinon and Bourgeuil. Gamay Excels in the Beaujolais district of France. It makes grapey wines that can be low in tannin — although the grape itself is fairly tannic. Grenache A Spanish grape by origin, called Garnacha there. Sometimes Grenache makes pale, high-alcohol wines that are dilute in flavor. In the right circumstances, it can make deeply colored wines with velvety texture and fruity aromas and flavors suggestive of raspberries.

Is it a grape? Most of the wines that you find in your wine shop or on restaurant wine lists are named in one of two basic ways: either for their grape variety or for the place where the grapes grew. That information, plus the name of the producer, becomes the shorthand name we use in talking about the wine.

Fontodi Chianti Classico is a wine made by the Fontodi winery and named after the place called Chianti Classico. That information is the kind of thing you can look up. Chapters 9 through 15 will help. Hello, my name is Chardonnay A varietal wine is a wine that is named after either the principal or the sole grape variety that makes up the wine. Each country and in the United States, some individual states has laws that dictate the minimum percentage of the named grape that a wine must contain if that wine wants to call itself by a grape name.

The issue is truth in advertising. In Oregon, the minimum is 90 percent except for Cabernet, which can be 75 percent. And in the countries that form the European Union EU , the minimum is 85 percent. Some varietal wines are made entirely from the grape variety for which the wine is named. All you know is that the wine contains at least the minimum legal percentage of the named variety.

Naming a wine for its grape variety is also very satisfying to exacting consumers. Knowing what grape a wine is made from is akin to knowing what type of oil is in the salad dressing, whether there are any trans-fats in your bread, and how much egg is in your egg roll. Most California and other American wines carry varietal names. Likewise, most Australian, South American, and South African wines are named by using the principal principle.

Varietal currency A common perception among some wine drinkers is that a varietal wine is somehow better than a non-varietal wine. Actually, the fact that a wine is named after its principal grape variety is absolutely no indication of quality. Hello, my name is Bordeaux Unlike American wines, most European wines are named for the region where their grapes grow rather than for the grape variety itself.

Instead, the labels say Burgundy, Bordeaux, Sancerre, and so on: the place where those grapes grow. Au contraire! The only catch is that to harvest this information, you have to learn something about the different regions from which the wines come. Turn to Chapters 9 through 15 for some of that information. Why name a wine after a place? Grapes, the raw material of wine, have to grow somewhere. Depending on the type of soil, the amount of sunshine, the amount of rain, the slope of the hill, and the many other characteristics that each somewhere has, the grapes will turn out differently.

If the grapes are different, the wine is different. Each wine, therefore, reflects the place where its grapes grow. Therefore, the name of a place where grapes are grown in Europe automatically connotes the grape or grapes used to make the wine of that place.

Terroir is the combination of immutable natural factors — such as topsoil, subsoil, climate sun, rain, wind, and so on , the slope of the hill, and altitude — that a particular vineyard site has.

Chances are that no two vineyards in the entire world have precisely the same combination of these factors. So we consider terroir to be the unique combination of natural factors that a particular vineyard site has.

The thinking goes like this: The name of the place connotes which grapes were used to make the wine of that place because the grapes are dictated by regulations , and the place influences the character of those grapes in its own unique way. Therefore, the most accurate name that a wine can have is the name of the place where its grapes grew. Place-names on American wine labels France may have invented the concept that wines should be named after their place of origin, but neither France nor even greater Europe has a monopoly on the idea.

Wine labels from non-European countries also tell you where a wine comes from — usually by featuring the name of a place somewhere on the label. But a few differences exist between the European and non-European systems. First of all, on an American wine label or an Australian, Chilean or South African label, for that matter you have to go to some effort to find the place-name on the label.

The place of origin is not the fundamental name of the wine as it is for most European wines ; the grape usually is. Second, place-names in the United States mean far less than they do in Europe.

Good thing the grape name is there, as big as day, on the label. Place-names on labels of non-European wines, for the most part, merely pay lip service to the concept of terroir. In fact, some non-European wine origins are ridiculously broad. This label says that this wine comes from a specific area that is 30 percent larger than the entire country of Italy! Some specific area! Italy has more than specific wine zones. Chapter 4: Wine Names and Label Lingo When the place on the label is merely California, in fact, that information tells you next to nothing about where the grapes grew.

Branded wines Most wines have brand names, including those wines that are named after their grape variety — like Cakebread brand name Sauvignon Blanc grape — and those that are named after their region of origin — like Masi brand name Valpolicella place.

Bigger than a breadbasket When we travel to other countries, we realize that people in different places have different ways of perceiving space and distance. Discussing place-names for European wines can be just as problematic. Some of the places are as small as several acres, some are square miles big, and others are the size of New Jersey. Certain words used to describe wine zones suggest the relative size of the place. In descending order of size and ascending order of specificity: country, region, district, subdistrict, commune, vineyard.

In France, some producers have deliberately added the grape name to their labels even though the grape is already implicit in the wine name.

And German wines usually carry grape names along with their official place-names. Wines with proprietary names You can find some pretty creative names on wine bottles these days: Tapestry, Conundrum, Insignia, Isosceles, Mythology, Trilogy.

Is this stuff to drink, to drive, or to dab behind your ears? Names like these are proprietary names often trademarked that producers create for special wines. In the case of American wines, the bottles with proprietary names usually contain wines made from a blend of grapes; therefore, no one grape name can be used as the name of the wine. In the case of European wines, the grapes used to make the wine were probably not the approved grapes for that region; therefore, the regional name could not be used on the label.

Although a brand name can apply to several different wines, a proprietary name usually applies to one specific wine. But the proprietary name Luce applies to a single wine. Chapter 4: Wine Names and Label Lingo Generic wines A generic name is a wine name that has been used inappropriately for so long that it has lost its original meaning in the eyes of the government exactly what Xerox, Kleenex, and Band-Aid are afraid of becoming.

So sometimes producers put all that information on the smaller of two labels and call that one the front label. Then the producers place a larger, colorful, dramatically eye-catching label — with little more than the name of the wine on it — on the back of the bottle. Guess which way the back label ends up facing when the bottle is placed on the shelf?

Besides, we enjoy the idea that wine producers and importers — whose every word and image on the label is scrutinized by the authorities — have found one small way of getting even with the government. Such items are generally referred to as the mandatory. Although U. Of the various phrases that may be used to identify the bottler on labels of wine sold in the United States, only the words produced by or made by indicate the name of the company that actually fermented 75 percent or more of the wine that is, who really made the wine ; words such as cellared by or vinted by mean only that the company subjected the wine to cellar treatment holding it for a while, for example.

Wines made outside the United States but sold within it must also carry the phrase imported by on their labels, along with the name and business location of the importer. Canadian regulations are similar. Many of these items must be indicated in both English and French. The European mandate Some of the mandatory information on American and Canadian wine labels is also required by the EU authorities for wines produced or sold in the European Union.

But the EU regulations require additional label items for wines produced in its member countries. This is a distinctly different use of the term table wine. Appellations of origin A registered place-name is called an appellation of origin. For European table wines — wines without an official appellation of origin — each European country has two phrases.

One term applies to table wines with a geographic indication actually Italy has two phrases in this category , and another denotes table wines with no geographic indication smaller than the country of production. Figure The label of a European wine to be sold in the United States. But the phrase does not appear on wine labels refer to Figure Nor does any such phrase appear on labels of Australian or South American wines. Some optional label lingo Besides the mandatory information required by government authorities, all sorts of other words can appear on wine labels.

Sometimes the same word can fall into either category, depending on the label. This ambiguity occurs because some words that are strictly regulated in some producing countries are not at all regulated in others. Chapter 4: Wine Names and Label Lingo The EU hierarchy of wine Although each country within the European Union makes its own laws regarding the naming of wine, these laws must fit within the framework of the European Union law.

Each appellation regulation defines the geographic area, the grapes that may be used, grape-growing practices, winemaking and aging techniques, and so on.

These latter wines may not carry a vintage or a grape name. If a wine has a geographic indication smaller than the country of origin, it enjoys higher status than otherwise. Vintage The word vintage followed by a year, or the year listed alone without the word vintage, is the most common optional item on a wine label refer to Figure Sometimes the vintage appears on the front label, and sometimes it has its own small label above the front label. The vintage year is nothing more than the year in which the grapes for a particular wine grew; the wine must have 75 to percent of the grapes of this year, depending on the country of origin.

Implicit in the extra aging is the idea that the wine was better than normal and, therefore, worthy of the extra aging. Spain even has degrees of reserve, such as Gran Reserva. But these days, the word is bandied about so much that it no longer has meaning. Estate-bottled Estate is a genteel word for a wine farm, a combined grape-growing and winemaking operation. The words estate-bottled on a wine label indicate that the company that bottled the wine also grew the grapes and made the wine.

In other words, estate-bottled suggests accountability from the vineyard to the winemaking through to the bottling. In many countries, the winery does not necessarily have to own the vineyards, but it has to control the vineyards and perform the vineyard operations. Ravenswood Winery — to name just one example — makes some terrific wines from the grapes of small vineyards owned and operated by private landowners. And some large California landowners, such as the Sangiacomo family, are quite serious about their vineyards but do not make wine themselves; they sell their grapes to various wineries.

None of those wines would be considered estate-bottled. Sometimes one winery will make two or three different wines that are distinguishable only by the vineyard name on the label.

Each wine is unique because the terroir of each vineyard is unique. These single vineyards may or may not be identified by the word vineyard next to the name of the vineyard. Italian wines, which are really into the single-vineyard game, will have vigneto or vigna on their labels next to the name of the single vineyard.

One additional expression on some French labels is Vieilles Vignes vee yay veen , which translates as old vines, and appears as such on some Californian and Australian labels. Because old vines produce a very small quantity of fruit compared to younger vines, the quality of their grapes and of the resulting wine is considered to be very good. The problem is, the phrase is unregulated.

Anyone can claim that his vines are old. It means the wine attained a higher alcohol level than a nonsuperior version of the same wine would have. But to find it, you have to fight your way through a jungle of jargon. You encounter it on the back labels of wine bottles, in the words the sales clerk uses to explain his recommendations, and on the signs all around the wine shop.

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