Category:Wine terms

There are two things to know about vintage. First, it refers to the year that the grapes used to make the wine were harvested. Hence a wine label that says 2007 means that the grapes in the wine were picked in 2007. Second, in 90 percent of the wine made in the world, the vintage doesn’t make any difference.

This, of course, is not what most wine drinkers — or non-wine drinkers, for that matter — think. We have been taught that vintage is one of the most important elements in wine making, and even people who don’t drink much wine are always asking: “Is this a good vintage?”

Instead, they should be asking: “Is this a quality producer?”

The basics of vintage start with weather. The grapes’ growing conditions are different each year, since the weather is warmer or colder or rainier — all of which affect the quality of the wine, how it tastes, and how long it will age. If there isn’t  enough rain, there is often little the winemaker can do to make up for the difference, and the wine will be different from a year in which there is enough rain.

There are also government regulations regarding vintage and its cousin, non-vintage, which refers to wine made with grapes from more than one vintage. Interestingly most champagne and sparkling wine is non-vintage (which is a topic for another day).

What we need to know about vintage is that there are three main reasons why it isn’t important for most wine, or about 9 out of 10 bottles on store shelves:

• Most wine is made to taste the same regardless of vintage. Producers want the wine to be consistent from year to year, so they try to even out any variations. The best example is $10 California grocery store merlot, which is amazingly consistent not just from vintage to vintage, but from producer to producer. They know what their customers want, and they make the wine that way.

• Technology has changed the way grapes are grown and the way wine is made. Many high-volume producers have high-tech vineyards, with sensors in the ground that track moisture content, temperature and the like. This allows producers to fiddle with growing conditions by changing the amount of water the vines get to account for rain and temperature variation. The goal here, again, is to make sure the wine is consistent from vintage to vintage.

• Grapes today are grown in regions of the world where the weather is almost always conducive to winemaking. In France and Germany, summers are shorter and cooler, and vintage is more important than in California or Australia. The joke among European winemakers that I talk to is that there is no such thing as a bad vintage in California. There are only good vintages and better ones.

When does vintage matter? Generally, the more expensive the wine, the more important vintage is. It’s irrelevant in a $10 wine, may matter a bit in a $25 wine, and comes into play in wine that costs $50 or more. And how many of us drink $50 wine regularly?

When is a wine term not really a wine term? When it ?s the term reserve, which is used to imply that the wine is of better quality, as in reserve cuvee or winemaker ?s reserve.

The truth is (in the United States, anyway) that the word reserve has no legal meaning. It can signify wine made with great care and effort, or it can be be nothing more than a marketing ploy.

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One reason so many people don ?t like red wine is because they ?re overwhelmed by the tannins. They sip the wine, and then taste something bitter and astringent just before they swallow (or spit it out, as the case may be). Then they shake their heads and go, ?No more red wine for me. ?

But tannins don ?t have to be that way.

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Americans drink red wine too warm and white wine too cold. As such, we have a difficult time tasting the wine the way it ?s supposed to taste.

How can this be, you ask? Isn ?t there one basic, simple wine rule left, and isn ?t it that red wine should be served at room temperature and that white wine should be chilled?

Yes, but there is room temperature and there is room temperature.

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This is one of the most perplexing differences to many wine drinkers, experienced or not. They ?ll confuse wine that is fruity, like sauvignon blanc or vigonier, with wine that is sweet, like riesling. In fact, there is a significant difference.

A dry wine, very simply, is a wine that isn ?t sweet ? nothing more complicated than that. Most of the wine sold in the U.S., save for white zinfandel, is dry, and that holds true whether it ?s red or white.

So why the confusion? Because most people associate dry wine with red wine, and with the tannins in red wine. The tannins are the stuff that causes the astringent, unpleasant flavor that makes your mouth pucker. It ?s one reason why so many people say they don ?t like red wine, though tannins don ?t have to be unpleasant and are actually a key part of well-made wine.

But tannins have very little to do with how dry the wine is. Dryness is the absence of sweetness, not the presence of tannins. A wine can be tannic and sweet, like poorly-made port. And white wines, which usually don ?t have any tannins, can be just as dry as red wines.

The other area of confusion revolves around the fruit flavors in wine. We ?re so accustomed to equating fruitiness with sweetness, like in jams and pies, that when we smell or taste a fruit flavor, we assume that it ?s sweet — even when it isn ?t. Case in point is a typical $10 California merlot, which is just bursting with ripe, mouth-filling blueberry flavor. But it doesn ?t have any measurable level of sugar, and is a bone dry wine.

How to explain the difference? Consider a glass of plain iced tea. That ?s dry, since it isn ?t sweet. Add lemon juice to the tea, and it becomes fruity, but dry. Now add sugar to the iced tea, and it becomes fruity and sweet tea. The principle is the same with wine.

One way to quickly tell whether a wine is sweet is the alcohol content. During the wine making process, the sugar in the grape juice is converted to alcohol. This means that the higher the alcohol, the drier the wine. Low alcohol, usually less than 12 percents, usually produces a sweeter wine.