Wine, wine, wine. From the many varieties, to the different ways to drink them, knowing your wines can be a difficult task. What makes a wine crisp and dry? What exactly is a full-bodied wine? What’s the difference between a light wine and a big wine? Turn into a wine aficionado and impress your wine snob friends at your next party with this in-depth guide on wine lingo, which works with alcohol-free wines as well.
The way a wine tastes is based on several factors and not just the colour as amateurs would like to think. The most important of these are:
- The type of grapes used to make the wine. This can be Chardonnay grapes, Cabernet Sauvignon grapes, Muscat grapes and more. Talking about the grapes used and the location the wine was made can add some vibrance to your discourse on wine.
- Vintage is a word commonly thrown about in wine circles and refers to the year the grapes were grown and NOT the year the wine was released. While ‘The older the better’ might be a common saying with wine, it is not always the case and factors like acidity and tannin content (more on this later) can affect the aging process.
- Cleansing the palate can significantly alter how a wine tastes. At a wine tasting, olives or bland water crackers are used to cleanse the palate and allow one to truly taste the wine and experience its flavour and smell.
Now that the basics are explained, its time to delve into the language of wine connoisseurs. It may seem daunting, but with these tips and tricks under your belt, you’ll be speaking wine in no time.
- A wine can be sweet or dry. Sweet wines are, as the word suggests, sweet. This is usually because the fermentation was stopped before all sugars were converted to alcohol. Wines are usually described as dry when they don’t have much residual sugar. This can be gauged often by swirling the wine around in the glass. Sweeter wines tend to cause a few drips along the sides, indicating more residual sugar, though this does not always mean the wine tastes sweeter, due to the action of other factors such as tannins and acidity.
- Wines are always made with grapes; however, a true wine lover knows that they carry different flavours. Some wines taste fruity, with hints of berries, apples, citrus, while some wines taste peppery, with lingering spicy flavours. Woody, earthy flavours can be representative of the ‘terroir’ which is the French word for the territory or region the wine was produced.
- Tannins influence the mouthfeel of a wine. If a wine leaves your mouth feeling dry or puckered, it probably has more tannins. Red wines usually have more tannins than white.
- The body of a wine refers to the way it fills your mouth as you drink it. Some wines seem to be heavy or full-bodied, while sweeter, more acidic wines are light or crisp.
Non-alcoholic wines retain almost all the distinctive characteristics of wine without losing out on flavour and taste. Serve up a storm with the best non-alcoholic wines and astound your guests with your in-depth knowledge.