Wine Articles

Cheat Sheet / Updated 03-17-2022

Making wine at home lets you explore your creative side — from choosing the perfect grapes to learning the lingo of wine-speak. Making your own wine is also a great way to unleash your inner science geek. You need to calculate conversions, understand wine chemistry (including sugar and pH levels), and regulate temperatures, all while paying attention to the basic laws of home winemaking.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 03-14-2022

Food and wine pairing isn’t a matter of life or death. But isn’t life a little better with a good taste in your mouth? Starting with wine you like (and food you enjoy, too) is ground zero. All the other delicious considerations that lead to outstanding moments of tasting pleasure come after. To make your food and wine pairing memorable, start with a versatile wine — one that agrees with a wide range of foods — and things won’t go far wrong. Then consider a handful of taste, texture, and aromatic elements, and you may just find some magic.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 03-09-2022

Choosing a French wine means understanding how to read and pronounce French wine names and words you find on the label, the variety of grape specific to certain French wines, and getting the best value of a French wine.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 02-11-2022

To enjoy Italian wine, all you have to do is drink it. But if you want to get just a bit under the grape skin, you can explore the major varieties of Italian red and white wines, the grapes they're made from, and how to say their names.

Article / Updated 09-01-2021

Every dish is dynamic: it’s made up of several ingredients and flavors that interact to create a (more or less) delicious whole. Every wine is dynamic in exactly the same way. When food and wine combine in your mouth, the dynamics of each change; the result is completely individual to each dish-and-wine combination. When wine meets food, several things can happen: The food can exaggerate a characteristic of the wine. For example, if you eat walnuts (which are tannic) with a tannic red wine, such as a Bordeaux, the wine tastes so dry and astringent that most people would consider it undrinkable. The food can diminish a characteristic of the wine. Salt diminishes the impression of tannin, for example, and an overly tannic red wine — unpleasant on its own — could be delightful with a well-salted rare steak or roast beef. The flavor intensity of the food can obliterate the wine’s flavor or vice versa. If you’ve ever drunk a big, rich flavorful white wine with a delicate filet of sole, you’ve had this experience firsthand. The wine can contribute new flavors to the dish. For example, a red Zinfandel that’s gushing with berry fruit can bring its berry flavors to the dish, as if another ingredient had been added. The combination of wine and food can create an unwelcome third-party flavor that wasn’t in the wine or the food originally. Fortunately, certain elements of food react in predictable ways with certain elements of wine, giving you a fighting chance at making successful pairings. The major components of wine (alcohol, sweetness, acid, and tannin) relate to the basic tastes of food (sweetness, sourness, bitterness, and saltiness) the same way that the principle of balance in wine operates: Some of the elements exaggerate each other, and some of them compensate for each other. The following notes about pairings illustrate some of the ways that food and wine interact, based on the components of the wine. Keep in mind that each wine and each dish has more than one component, and the simple relationships described can be complicated by other elements in the wine or the food. Whether a wine is considered tannic, sweet, acidic, or high in alcohol depends on its dominant component. Tannic wines Tannic wines include most wines based on the cabernet sauvignon grape (including red Bordeaux), northern Rhône reds, Barolo and Barbaresco, and any wine — white or red — that has become tannic from aging in new oak barrels. These wines can Taste less bitter when paired with salty foods Taste astringent, or mouth-drying, when paired with spicy-hot foods Taste bitter with bitter foods Sweet wines Many so-called dry wines today actually have some sweetness, particularly inexpensive (about $12 or less) wines from California. Wines with unmistakable sweetness include most moscato wines, white zinfandel, many rieslings (unless they’re labeled dry or trocken), and medium-dry vouvray. Sweet wines also include dessert wines such as port, sweetened sherries, and late-harvest wines. Depending on their level of sweetness, these wines can Taste fruitier when matched with salty foods Make salty foods more appealing Go well with foods as sweet as they are, but not sweeter Acidic wines Acidic wines include most Italian white wines; Sancerre, Pouilly-fumé, and Chablis; traditionally made red wines from Rioja; most dry rieslings; and fully dry wines based on sauvignon blanc. These wines can Counterbalance oily or fatty heaviness in food Taste smoother and less acidic when served with salty foods Stand up to foods that have some acidity High-alcohol wines High-alcohol wines include many California wines, both white and red; southern Rhône whites and reds; southern Italian reds; fortified wines such as port and sherry; and most wines produced from grapes grown in warm climates. These wines can Overwhelm lightly flavored or delicate dishes Seem less rich and full with slightly sweet foods Seem less rich and full with umami-rich foods

Cheat Sheet / Updated 08-06-2021

Selecting a wine you like is easy when you can correctly pronounce wine names, use appropriate terms to describe wine, decode wine names, and approach the selecting process with confidence.

Article / Updated 07-09-2019

You drink beverages every day, tasting them as they pass through your mouth. But when it comes to wine, drinking and tasting are not synonymous. Wine is much more complex than other beverages: There’s more going on in a mouthful of wine. For example, most wines have a lot of different (and subtle) flavors, all at the same time, and they give you multiple simultaneous sensations, such as softness and sharpness together. If you just drink wine by gulping it down the way you do soda, you miss a lot of what you paid for. 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: Slow down. Pay attention. The process of tasting a wine — of systematically experiencing all the wine’s attributes — has three steps, which we discuss in the following sections. The first two steps don’t actually involve your mouth at all: First, you look at the wine, and then you smell it. Finally, you get to sip it. Savoring a wine’s appearance We enjoy looking at the wine in our glass, noticing how brilliant it is and the way it reflects the light, trying to decide precisely which shade of red it is and whether it will stain the tablecloth permanently if we tilt the glass too far. To observe a wine’s appearance, tilt a (no more than half-full) glass away from you and look at the color of the wine against a white background, such as the tablecloth or a piece of paper (a colored background distorts the color of the wine). Notice how dark or how pale the wine is and what color it is. Also notice whether the wine is cloudy, clear, or brilliant. (Most wines are clear. Some unfiltered wines can be less than brilliant but shouldn’t be cloudy.) Eventually, you’ll begin to notice patterns, such as deeper color in younger red wines and older white wines. If you have time, at this point you can also swirl the wine around in your glass (see the following section) and observe the way the wine runs back down the inside of the glass. 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. Today, we know that a wine’s legs are a complicated phenomenon having to do with the surface tension of the wine and the evaporation rate of the wine’s alcohol. If you’re a physicist, feel free to show off your expertise and enlighten your fellow tasters — but otherwise, don’t bother drawing conclusions from the legs. The nose knows: Sniffing wine After you observe a wine’s appearance, you get to the really fun part of tasting wine: swirling and sniffing. This is the stage when you can let your imagination run wild, and no one will ever dare to contradict you. If you say that a wine smells like wild strawberries to you, how can anyone prove that it doesn’t? Before we explain the smelling ritual, and the tasting technique that goes along with it (described in the next section), we want to assure you that (a) you don’t have to apply this procedure to every single wine you drink; (b) you won’t look foolish doing it, at least in the eyes of other wine lovers (we can’t speak for the rest of the human population); and (c) it’s a great trick at parties to avoid talking with someone you don’t like. To get the most out of your sniffing, swirl the wine in the glass first. But don’t even think about swirling your wine if your glass is more than half full. 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. Free-associate. Is the aroma fruity, woodsy, fresh, cooked, intense, mild? Your nose tires quickly, but it recovers quickly, too. Wait just a moment and try again. Listen to your friends’ comments and try to find the same things they find in the smell. 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. But what if you notice a smell that you don’t like? Hang around wine geeks for a while, and you’ll start to hear words like petrol, sweaty saddle, burnt match, and asparagus used to describe the aromas of some wines. “Yuck!” you say? Of course you do! Fortunately, the wines that exhibit such smells are not the wines you’ll be drinking for the most part — at least not unless you really catch the wine bug. And when you do catch the wine bug, you might discover that those aromas, in the right wine, can really be a kick. Even if you don’t come to enjoy those smells (some of us do, honest!), you’ll appreciate them as typical characteristics of certain regions or grapes. Wine can also have bad smells that nobody will try to defend. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen, because wine is a natural, agricultural product with a will of its own. Often, when a wine is seriously flawed, it shows immediately in the nose of the wine. Wine judges have a term for such wines. They call them DNPIM — Do Not Put in Mouth. Not that you’ll get ill, but why subject your taste buds to the same abuse that your nose just took? Sometimes a bad cork is to blame, and sometimes the problem lies with some issue in the winemaking or even the storage of the wine. Just rack it up to experience and open a different bottle. When it comes to smelling wine, many people are concerned that they aren’t able to detect as many aromas as they think they should. Smelling wine is really just a matter of practice and attention. If you start to pay more attention to smells in your normal activities, you’ll get better at smelling wine. Tips for smelling wine Try these techniques for getting more out of wine when you sniff: Be bold. Stick your nose right into the airspace of the glass where the aromas are captured. Don’t wear a strong scent; it will compete with the smell of the wine. Don’t knock yourself out smelling a wine when strong food aromas are present. The meat you smell in the wine could really be a stew cooking on the stove. Become a smeller. 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. Stuff your mental database with smells so you’ll have aroma memories at your disposal when you need to draw on them. Try different techniques of sniffing. Some people like to take short, quick “rabbit sniffs,” while others like to inhale a deep whiff of the wine’s smell. Keeping your mouth open a bit while you inhale can help you perceive aromas. (Some people even hold one nostril closed and smell with the other, but we think that’s a bit kinky.) 10 aromas (or flavors) associated with win The following are some of the most common aromas you can find in wine: Fruits of all sorts Herbs Flowers Earth Grass Tobacco Butterscotch Toast Vanilla Coffee, mocha, or chocolate The mouth action when wine tasting After you’ve looked at the wine and smelled it, you’re finally allowed to taste it. This is the stage 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’s focusing all his energy on the last few drops of a special wine. Here’s the procedure to follow: Take a medium-sized sip of wine. Hold the wine in your mouth, purse your lips, and draw in some air across your tongue, over the wine. (Be utterly careful not to choke or dribble, or everyone will strongly suspect that you’re not a wine expert.) Swish the wine around in your mouth as if you’re chewing it. Swallow the wine. The whole process should take several seconds, depending on how much you are concentrating on the wine. Wines have noses — and palates, too With poetic license typical of wine tasters, someone once dubbed the smell of a wine its nose — and the expression took hold. If someone says that a wine has a huge nose, he means that the wine has a very strong aroma. If he says that he detects lemon in the nose or on the nose, he means that the wine smells something 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. Wine tasters talk about the wine’s nose or aroma. 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. A wine’s palate is the overall impression the wine gives in your mouth, or any isolated aspect of the wine’s taste — as in, “This wine has a harmonious palate,” or “The palate of this wine is a bit acidic.” When a wine taster says that he finds raspberries on the palate, he means that the wine has the flavor of raspberries. Feeling the tastes Taste buds on the tongue can register various sensations, which are known as the basic tastes — sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami, a savory characteristic. Of these tastes, sweetness, sourness, and bitterness are those most commonly found in wine. By moving the wine around in your mouth, you give it a chance to hit all your taste buds so that you don’t miss anything in the wine (even if sourness and bitterness sound like things you wouldn’t mind missing). As you swish the wine around in your mouth, you’re 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 often registers in your brain first; acidity (which, by the way, is known to normal people as sourness) and bitterness register subsequently. While your brain is working out the relative impressions of sweetness, acidity, and bitterness, you can be thinking about how the wine feels in your mouth — whether it’s heavy, light, smooth, rough, and so on. Tasting the smells of wine Until you cut your nose in on the action, all you can taste in the wine are those three sensations of sweetness, acidity, and bitterness and a general impression of weight and texture. Where have all the wild strawberries gone? They’re still there in the wine, right next to the chocolate and plums. 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 the following figure). When you draw in air across the wine in your mouth, you’re vaporizing the aromas just as you did when you swirled the wine in your glass. There’s a method to this madness. After you go through all this rigmarole, it’s time to reach a conclusion: Do you like what you tasted? The possible answers are yes, no, an indifferent shrug of the shoulders, or “I’m not sure, let me take another taste,” which means that you have serious wine-nerd potential.

Article / Updated 01-30-2019

Once upon a time, wine labels were boring, colorless (literally and in spirit), and the opposite of inviting. Now, many wine labels are fun. They catch your eye, draw you in for a closer look, and maybe make you smile. Although we tend to have classic tastes in wine, we love the variety of wine labels because it makes browsing for wine more enjoyable than ever. But wine labels have an important purpose besides making their bottles stand out on the shelves. Wine labels contain information about the wine that’s inside the bottle — and knowing what the information means can make you a smarter buyer. Sometimes that information is straightforward — like the name of the region where the grapes grew — and sometimes it’s tricky, like long phrases in a foreign language that you don’t speak. The mandatory sentences on wine labels The government authorities in the United States (and other governments) mandate that certain information appear on the main label of all wine bottles — basic stuff, such as the alcohol content, the type of wine (usually red table wine or white table wine), and the country of origin. Such items are generally referred to as the mandatory. These items include the following: A brand name Indication of class or type (table wine, dessert wine, or sparkling wine) The percentage of alcohol by volume (unless it’s implicit — for example, the statement table wine implies an alcohol content of less than 14 percent) Name and location of the bottler Net contents (expressed in milliliters; the standard wine bottle is 750 milliliters, which is 25.6 ounces) The phrase Contains Sulfites (with very, very few exceptions) The government warning (that we won’t dignify by repeating here; just pick up any bottle of wine, and you’ll see it on a label) The following figure shows you how all the details come together on a label of an American varietal wine. 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. The mandatory information required on U.S. and Canadian wine labels is also required by the E.U. authorities for most wines produced in European Union countries (although the wording of the warning label can vary). The labels of those E.U. wines must contain one additional item of information not required on labels of wines from elsewhere. This additional item is a phrase indicating that the wine comes from an officially recognized wine zone (see the next section for the scoop). Indications of origin The European Union has set up a system to recognize and protect agricultural products (such as wine, cheese, olives, hams, and so forth) that come from specific places so that companies in other places can’t make products with the same name and thus confuse consumers. Wines from all the classic wine regions of E.U. member countries (France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and so forth) are covered under this system. When you see the label of a European wine that’s from a recognized, protected place, you’ll find a phrase to that effect. Actually, two different phrases exist because European wines from protected places fall into two categories: Wines named for places where production is highly regulated so that the very place-name of the wine not only defines the territory of production but also connotes the wine’s grape varieties, grape-growing methods, and winemaking techniques Wines that carry the protected names of larger places where winemakers have more freedom in terms of the grape varieties and production methods they use The E.U.’s mandated phrases for these two types of place-name wines are the following: Protected Designation of Origin (PDO), for the most regulated wines. The classic wines mentioned in the sidebar “Decoding common European place-names,” for example, are all in this category. Protected Geographic Indication (PGI), for the less regulated wines from registered regions. In theory, every bottle of European wine — except for the most broadly sourced, least expensive wines — carries one of these two phrases on its label. But in practice, the situation is much more complicated, especially at the moment. How so? For one thing, each country can, and does, translate the words Protected Designation of Origin and Protected Geographic Indication into its own language on its labels. Second, because these E.U. designations went into full effect only in 2012, some wine labels still carry the phrases that were previously used by each country to designate a wine’s category of origin. And finally, each country can permit its wineries to continue using the former phrases rather than the new phrases. If you’re getting into French, Italian, or other European wines and see a long, foreign phrase on the label that’s adjacent to the place-name or region of the wine, know that it indicates an officially protected geographic zone. If you really want to know which of the two protected categories the wine falls into, refer to the lists in the next two sections. Incidentally, the phrase for a registered place-name in the United States is American Viticultural Area (AVA). But the phrase doesn’t appear on wine labels. Nor does any such phrase appear on labels of Australian or South American wines. Nor do two different degrees of regulations exist, as they do in the European Union. Label terms that mean PDO (Protected Designation of Origin) Here are the phrases — first in the new terminology and then in the original terminology — that you might find on labels of PDO wines from the major European countries. In all cases, the phrases translate more or less as “Protected Designation of Origin”: France: Appellation d’Origine Protégée (AOP) or Appellation Contrôlée or Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AC or AOC, in short) Italy: Denominazione di Origine Protetta (DOP) or Denominazione di Origine Controllata (DOC); and for certain wines of an even higher status, Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita (DOCG) Spain: Denominación de Origen Protegida (DOP) or Denominación de Origen (DO), as well as Denominación de Origen Calificada (DOCa) for regions with the highest status (of which only two exist: Rioja and Priorat) Portugal: Denominação de Origem Protegida (DOP) or Denominação de Origem Controlada (DOC) Germany: Qualitätswein; and for wines of higher ripeness, Prädikatsweine This figure shows a European wine label as it would appear in the United States, using the original place-name terminology. Label terms that mean PGI (Protected Geographic Indication) Here are the phrases — first in the new terminology and then in the original terminology — that you might find on labels of PGI wines from the major European countries. In all cases, the phrases translate more or less as “Protected Geographic Indication”: France: Indication Géographique Protégée (IGP) or Vin de Pays followed by the name of an approved area Italy: Indicazione Geografica Protetta (IGP) or Indicazione Geografica Tipica (IGT) and the name of an approved area Spain: Indicación Geográfica Protegida (IGP) or Vino de la Tierra followed by the name of an approved area Portugal: Indicaçõa Geográfica (IG) to refer to a region, but on a label, the original phrase, Vinho Regional (regional wine) and the name of an approved area Germany: Landwein Some optional label lingo Besides the mandatory information required by government authorities, all sorts of other words can appear on wine labels. These words include meaningless phrases intended to make you think that you’re getting a special quality wine, and words that provide useful information about what’s in the bottle. 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 aren’t regulated at all in others. 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 4-2). Sometimes the vintage appears on the label itself, and sometimes it has its own small label closer to the neck of the bottle. The vintage year is nothing more than the year in which the grapes for a particular wine grew; the wine must have 75 to 100 percent of the grapes of this year, depending on the country of origin. (Non-vintage wines contain wines from more than one year.) But an aura surrounds vintage-dated wine causing many people to believe that any wine with a vintage date is by definition better than a wine without a vintage date. In fact, no correlation exists between the presence of a vintage date and the wine’s quality. Generally speaking, what vintage a wine is — that is, whether the grapes grew in a year with perfect weather or whether the grapes were meteorologically challenged — is an issue you need to consider (a) only when you buy top-quality wines, and (b) mainly when those wines come from parts of the world that experience significant variations in weather from year to year — such as many European wine regions. Reserve Reserve is our favorite meaningless word on U.S. wine labels. The term is used to convince you that the wine inside the bottle is special. This trick usually works because the word does have specific meaning and does carry a certain amount of prestige on labels of wines from many other countries: In Italy and Spain, the word reserve (or its foreign language equivalent, which looks something like reserve) indicates a wine that has received extra aging at the winery before release. 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. In France, the use of reserve isn’t regulated. However, its use is generally consistent with the notion that the wine is better in quality than a given producer’s norm. In the United States, the word reserve has historically been used in the same sense — as in, Beaulieu Vineyards Georges de Latour Private Reserve, the best Cabernet that Beaulieu Vineyards makes. But these days, the word is bandied about so much that it no longer has meaning. For example, some California wines labeled Proprietor’s Reserve are the least expensive wines in a particular producer’s lineup and some of the least expensive wines, period. Other wines are labeled Special Reserve, Vintage Reserve, Vintner’s Reserve, or Reserve Selection — all utterly meaningless phrases. 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 grew the grapes and made the wine also bottled the wine. In other words, estate-bottled suggests accountability from the vineyard to the winemaking through to the bottling. In many countries, the winery doesn’t necessarily have to own the vineyards, but it has to control the vineyards and perform the vineyard operations. Estate-bottling is an important concept to those who believe that you can’t make good wine unless the grapes are as good as they can possibly be. If we made wine, we’d sure want to control our own vineyards. We wouldn’t go so far as to say that great wines must be estate-bottled, though. 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 are quite serious about their vineyards but don’t make wine themselves; they sell their grapes to various wineries. None of those wines would be considered estate-bottled. Sometimes French wine labels carry the words domaine-bottled or château-bottled (or the phrase mis en bouteille au château/au domaine). The concept is the same as estate-bottled, with domaine and château being equivalent to the U.S. term estate. Vineyard name Some wines in the medium-to-expensive price category — costing about $25 or more — might carry on the label the name of the specific vineyard where the grapes for that wine grew. 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 might or might 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. Or they won’t. It’s optional. Even more optional words on the label You’ll be pleased to know that we have just about exhausted our list of terms that you could find on a wine label. 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. The word superior can appear in French (Supérieure) or Italian (Superiore) as part of a PDO place-name. It traditionally meant that the wine attained a higher alcohol level than a non-superior version of the same wine would have — a distinction not worth losing sleep over. Now, the term is also used in Italy to designate a specific type of wine. Soave Superiore, for example, is a wine that’s distinct from the wine Soave by virtue of its vineyard location, winemaking, and so forth. The word Classico appears on the labels of some Italian PDO wines when the grapes come from the heartland of the named place.

Article / Updated 01-30-2019

Instead of worrying about crisp wines, earthy wines, and medium-bodied wines, wouldn’t it just be easier to walk into a wine shop and say, “Give me a very good wine for dinner tonight”? Isn’t quality the ultimate issue — or at least, quality within your price range, also known as value? In fact, a good deal of wine marketing revolves around the notion of quality, except in the case of the least expensive wines. 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. However, quality wines come in all colors, all degrees of sweetness and dryness, and all flavor profiles. Just because a wine is high quality doesn’t mean that you’ll actually enjoy it, any more than a three-star rating means that you’ll love a particular restaurant. Personal taste is simply more relevant than quality in choosing a wine. Degrees of quality do exist among wines. But a wine’s quality is not absolute: How great a wine is or isn’t depends on who’s doing the judging. The instruments that measure the quality of a wine are a human being’s nose, mouth, and brain, and because everyone is different, everyone has a different opinion on how good a wine is. The combined opinion of a group of trained, experienced tasters (also known as wine experts) is usually considered a reliable judgment of a wine’s quality. In the following sections, we explore what makes a good wine good and what makes a poor wine inferior. What’s a good wine? 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. These standards involve mysterious concepts like balance, length, depth, complexity, finish, and trueness to type (typicity in Winespeak), which we explain in the following sections. None of these concepts is objectively measurable, by the way. Taste is personal. Literally! 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. The most sensitive tasters are called, somewhat misleadingly, supertasters — not because they’re more expert, but because they perceive sensations such as bitterness more acutely. 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 might fall into this category — and you, therefore, might find many red wines unpleasant, even if other people consider them great. Balance The three words sweetness, acidity, and tannin represent three of the major components (parts) of wine. The fourth is alcohol. Besides being one of the reasons we often want to drink a glass of wine in the first place, alcohol is an important player in wine quality. Balance is the relationship of these four components to one another. A wine is balanced when nothing sticks out, such as harsh tannin or too much sweetness, as you taste the wine. 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 might 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.) Tannin and acidity are hardening elements in a wine (they make a wine taste firmer and less giving 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. Balance in action: To experience the principle of taste-balance firsthand, try this: Make a very strong cup of black tea and chill it. When you sip it, the cold tea will taste bitter, because it’s very tannic. 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 counterbalance the acid-tannin impact, and the tea will taste softer and more agreeable than it did before. Length When we call wines long or short, we’re not referring to the size of the bottle or how quickly we empty it. Length describes 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. Many wines today are very upfront on the palate — they make a big impression as soon as you taste them, but they don’t go the distance in your mouth. In other words, they’re short. Length is increasingly used also to describe a wine with a long aftertaste. (See the section, “Finish,” just ahead.) Length in the mouth can more precisely be called palate length, to avoid confusion. Long palate length is a sure sign of high quality. Depth Depth 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 doesn’t taste flat and one-dimensional in your mouth. A “flat” wine can never be great. Complexity Nothing is wrong with a simple, straightforward wine, especially if you enjoy it. 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. Generally, experts use the term complexity specifically to indicate that a wine has a multiplicity of aromas and flavors; some people use the term it in a more holistic (but less precise) sense, to refer to the total impression a wine gives you, but this use is becoming uncommon. Finish The impression a wine leaves in the back of your mouth and in your throat after you swallow it is its finish or aftertaste. In a good wine, you can still perceive the wine’s flavors, such as fruitiness or spiciness, at that point. The more enduring the positive flavor perception is, the longer the finish is. 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, which tells you that it is probably not a great wine. Typicity In order to judge whether a wine is true to its type, you have to know how that type of wine is supposed to taste. So you have to know the textbook characteristics of wines made from the major grape varieties and wines of the world’s classic wine regions. (For example, the Cabernet Sauvignon grape typically has an aroma and flavor of black currants, and the French white wine called Pouilly-Fumé typically has a slight gunflint aroma.) What’s a bad wine? Strangely enough, the right to declare a wine good because you like it doesn’t carry with it the right to call a wine bad just because you don’t. In this game, you get to make your own rules, but you don’t get to force other people to live by them. The fact is that very few bad wines exist in the world today. And many of the wines we could call bad are actually just bad bottles of wine — unlucky bottles that were handled badly so that the good wine inside them got ruined. Here are some characteristics that everyone agrees indicate a bad wine (or a bad bottle). We hope you never meet one. Vinegar: In the natural evolution of things, wine is just a passing stage between grape juice and vinegar. Most wines today remain in the wine stage because of technology or careful winemaking. If you find a wine that has crossed the line toward vinegar, it’s bad wine. Chemical or bacterial smells: The most common are acetone (nail polish thinner) and sulfur flaws (rotten eggs, burnt rubber, bad garlic). Bad wines. Oxidized wine: This wine smells flat, inexpressive, or maybe cooked, and it tastes the same. It might have been a good wine once, but air — oxygen — got in somehow and killed the wine. Bad bottle. Cooked aromas and taste: When a wine has been stored or shipped in heat, it can actually taste cooked or baked as a result (wine people use the term maderized for such wines). Often there’s telltale leakage from the cork, or the cork has pushed up a bit inside the bottle. Bad bottle. (Unfortunately, every other bottle of that wine that experienced the same shipping or storage will also be bad.) Corky wine: The most common flaw, corkiness comes across as a smell of damp cardboard that gets worse with air, along with diminished flavor intensity. It’s caused by a defective cork, and any wine in a bottle that’s sealed with a cork is at risk for it. Bad bottle. (Fortunately, only a very small percentage of wines are corky.) Let’s not dwell too long on what can go wrong with a wine. If you find a bad wine or a bad bottle — or even a wine that’s considered a good wine, but you don’t like it — just move on to something you like better. Drinking a so-called great wine that you don’t enjoy is as time-wasting as watching a television show that bores you. Change the channel. Explore.

Article / Updated 01-30-2019

The tastes of a wine reveal themselves sequentially as the tongue detects them and your brain registers them. We recommend that you follow the natural sequence we describe in the next sections when you try to put words to what you’re tasting. Sweetness in wine 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. Classify the wine you’re tasting as either dry, off-dry (in other words, slightly sweet), or sweet. Is it sweetness or fruitiness? Beginning wine tasters sometimes describe dry wines as sweet because they confuse fruitiness with sweetness. Here’s the difference: A wine is fruity when it has distinct aromas and flavors of fruit. You smell the fruitiness with your nose; in your mouth, you “smell” it through your retronasal passage (see the earlier section “Tasting the smells”). Sweetness, on the other hand, is a tactile impression on your tongue. When in doubt, try holding your nose when you taste the wine; if the wine really is sweet, you’ll be able to taste the sweetness despite the fact that you can’t smell the fruitiness. Acidity of wine All wine contains acid (mainly tartaric acid, which exists in grapes), but some wines are more acidic than others. Acidity is a key taste factor in white wines more than in reds. For white wines, acidity is the backbone of the wine’s taste (it gives the wine firmness in your mouth). 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 wine-tasters call the mid-palate. How much you salivate after tasting a wine can be a clue to its acidity level, because high acidity triggers saliva production. You can also sense the consequences of acidity (or the lack of it) in the overall style of the wine — whether it’s a tart little number or a soft and generous sort, for example. Classify the wine you’re tasting as crisp, soft, or Pillsbury Doughboy. 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 also feels texture. Some wines literally feel soft and smooth as they move through your mouth, while others feel hard, rough, edgy, 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. Initially, it’s enough to notice a wine’s texture, without figuring out what factor is creating that sensation. Tannin in wine Tannin is a substance that exists naturally in the skins, seeds (or pips), and stems of grapes. 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. Aging wine in new 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? That’s tannin. 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 wine tannins are less bitter than others. Also, other elements of the wine, such as sweetness, can mask the perception of bitterness. You sense tannin — as bitterness or as firmness or richness of texture — mainly in the rear of your mouth, 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. Is it acid or tannin? Red wines have acid as well as tannin, and distinguishing between the two as you taste a wine can be a real challenge. When you’re not sure whether you’re perceiving mainly tannin or acid, pay attention to how your mouth feels after you swallow the wine. Acid makes you salivate (saliva is alkaline, and it flows to neutralize the acid). Tannin leaves your mouth dry. A wine's body A wine’s body is an impression you get from the whole of the wine — not a basic taste that registers on your tongue. It’s the impression of the weight and size of the wine in your mouth, which is usually attributable mainly to a wine’s alcohol. We say impression because, obviously, one ounce of any wine will occupy exactly the same space in your mouth and weigh the same as one ounce of any other wine. But some wines seem fuller, bigger, or heavier in the mouth than others. Think about the wine’s fullness and weight as you taste it. 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. The flavor dimension Wines have flavors (uh, we mean mouth aromas), but wines don’t come in a specific flavor. Although you may enjoy the suggestion of chocolate in a red wine that you’re tasting, you wouldn’t want to go to a wine store and ask for a chocolaty wine, unless you don’t mind the idea of people holding their hands over their mouths and trying not to laugh at you. 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 flavors 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. So many flavors exist in wines that we could go on and on (and we often do!), but you get the picture, don’t you? (By the way, chocolate-like flavors would fall into the family of nuts or kernels, along with flavors of coffee and of nuts themselves.) If you like a wine and want to try another wine that’s similar but different (and it will always be different, we guarantee you), one method is to decide what families of flavors in the wine you like and mention that to the person selling you your next bottle. In Parts 3, 4, and 5, you find wines that fit these specific flavors. Another aspect of flavor that’s very important to consider is a wine’s flavor intensity — how much flavor the wine has, regardless of what those flavors are. Some wines are as flavorful as a chili cheese dog, while others have flavors as subtle as ungarnished fillet of sole. Flavor intensity is a major factor in pairing wine with food, and it’s also an issue in determining how much a wine appeals to you.