Basic Wine Info

Several statements about wine that may help with your enjoyment. Or, at least, make you look smarter.  :)

Almost all wine grapes have clear juice. Almost all white wines are from green skinned grapes, reds from dark red skinned grapes. Red wines ferment with the grape skins extracting the color. Just the juice is fermented in white wines so there is no grape skin contact. Rosé are red wine grapes with a few hours of skin contact.

The major steps of making a white wine: Press the grapes to extract the juice > add yeast to ferment the sugars into alcohol > move wine between tanks or barrels to remove sediment (called racking) > bottling. Note: some white wines are aged in oak barrels after fermentation.

The major steps of making a red wine: Remove the stems > crush the grapes (break open the grape skins) > fermentation > press the grapes to get the liquid off the skins > barrel age > bottling.

Pressing chardonnay

The aroma is from the grape variety. Examples are fruit and herb smells. Bouquet is from winemaking and aging. Examples are vanilla and cloves from oak barrels. You'll find many people use aroma or smell when describing any wine attribute.

Swirling the wine in a glass adds oxygen releasing more aromas. For the same reason some will hold a wine in their mouth for a few seconds or even swish it around to get more oxygen and therefore more flavors from the wine. If you don't fill a wine glass more than half way, there's plenty of room to swirl the wine without spilling.

Usually wines are tasted from lightest to heaviest, whites before reds, dry wines then sweet wine. This has to do with the effects on your palate and not being able to properly taste a chardonnay after having a young cabernet first, for instance.

The vintage year on the label is the year the grapes were harvested. In the Northern Hemisphere, that's about August through October, in the southern February to April. Most white wines are bottled within a few months, reds can be a couple of years or more after harvest because of barrel aging.

Barrel aging adds flavors and ages the wine. This has been done since the Romans used oak barrels to transport wine.

French harvest, 1539

 
The slow exposure to oxygen is what matures a wine, whether in oak barrels or in the bottle.

The purpose of the stem on a wine glass is to allow you to hold the wine and not transfer body heat -- assuming it's already at the proper serving temperature.

Different wines have different recommended serving temperatures for optimum drinking. Too cold and you lose many flavors, too warm and it tastes bitter. 

Not all wines improve with age from the time you buy them. A minority of wines are better with a few years of aging, a very few will age a decade or more.

Store your wines at a constant cool temperature away from light. Your kitchen is the worst place to store wine, btw.

This kitchen wine rack is really a bad idea

European wines are traditionally named after geographic locations such as Burgundy or Chianti and contain certain grape varieties depending on the local law. Other regions name the wine after the grape variety, like chardonnay or zinfandel. 

Champagne is a sparkling wine from the Champagne region of France. So other sparkling wines aren't actually Champagne, although many Americans will call them by that name.

The largest producers of wine are France, Italy, Spain and California. California makes almost 90% of all American wine. 

Sonoma and Napa counties each produce about 4% of the state's wine with most coming from the Central Valley. 

The number one wine from California is chardonnay, as it represents nearly 20% of wine sold in the U.S.

Every vineyard is unique because of climate, soil type, sun exposure, slope, elevation, vine trellising, vineyard management, and other reasons. In many parts of Sonoma County you are a few minutes walk from a different soil type and a few minutes drive from a different microclimate.

This vineyard in Sonoma County's Alexander Valley
has different slopes, elevations, and probably soil types
So a wine made from the flatlands would likely be different
from one made from the slope