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A 'cuvée' originally refers to the contents of a single fermentation vat — a specific batch of wine. In modern usage, it identifies a particular wine within a producer's range, often their top selection ('cuvée prestige') or a distinct blend.
You can recognise a good wine by taste through three core qualities: balance (no single element — acidity, alcohol, tannin, or sugar — dominates), complexity (multiple layers of identifiable flavours), and length (the flavour lingers for more than 6-8 seconds after swallowing).
Red wine stains your teeth because of anthocyanins — natural pigments that give it its colour — combined with the wine's acidity, which softens tooth enamel, and tannins, which help the pigments stick to the surface.
Acidity in wine refers to the organic acids — mainly tartaric, malic, and citric — that give wine its freshness, liveliness, and structure. A typical dry white wine has a pH between 3.0 and 3.4, while red wine ranges from 3.3 to 3.6.
Terroir is the unique combination of natural factors — soil, subsoil, climate, topography, and sun exposure — plus human traditions and know-how that give a wine its distinctive character, one that cannot be replicated elsewhere. It is the founding principle behind France's appellation system.
Professional wine tasting follows a structured five-step method — sight, first nose, second nose (after swirling), palate, and conclusion — designed to objectively assess a wine's quality, origin, and ageing potential.
Describing wine means systematically evaluating three dimensions: sight (colour, clarity, intensity), smell (aroma families), and taste (attack, mid-palate, finish, balance). Using a structured vocabulary helps you communicate what you experience in a way others can understand.
The most consistently expensive wine in the world is Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC) Romanée-Conti Grand Cru, which averages over USD 20,000 per bottle. The all-time auction record was set in 2018 when a bottle of 1945 Romanée-Conti sold for USD 558,000 at Sotheby's.
Minerality is a tasting term used to describe flavours and textures that evoke wet stone, chalk, flint, or oyster shell in a wine. While widely used by professionals, no direct scientific link between soil minerals and wine flavour has been conclusively proven.
Swirling wine in your glass exposes a larger surface area to air, which speeds up oxidation and releases volatile aromatic compounds. This simple move can double or even triple the intensity of aromas reaching your nose.
Smelling the cork is a common ritual, but it tells you surprisingly little. A cork might reveal a strong musty taint from TCA (2,4,6-trichloroanisole), yet the only reliable way to check a wine is to smell and taste the liquid itself in the glass.
Some white wines are sweet because the winemaker stops fermentation before yeast converts all the grape sugar into alcohol. This can happen naturally — when grapes are harvested ultra-ripe, affected by noble rot, or frozen on the vine — or by deliberately halting fermentation through chilling or filtration.
A dry wine is one where nearly all the grape sugar has been converted to alcohol during fermentation, leaving less than 4 g/l of residual sugar. A sweet wine retains some of that sugar, ranging from off-dry (around 12-45 g/l) to lusciously sweet dessert wines (over 45 g/l).
Wine 'legs' or 'tears' are the slow-moving droplets that trickle down the inside of your glass after you swirl it. They are caused by the Marangoni effect — a difference in surface tension between alcohol and water — and mainly indicate alcohol content and residual sugar.
Tannins are naturally occurring polyphenols found in grape skins, seeds, and stems that create a dry, slightly bitter sensation on your palate. They give red wine its structure and backbone, and are a key reason why some bottles improve with age.
The main difference is skin contact: red wine ferments with grape skins (which provide colour and tannins), white wine is pressed before fermentation (juice only), and rosé gets a short maceration (2 to 24 hours) to extract just a pink hue.
Wine is made in 5 main steps: harvesting, crushing/pressing, alcoholic fermentation (yeast converts sugar to alcohol), aging (in tank or barrel), and bottling. The full process takes anywhere from a few weeks to several years depending on the style.
Wine is an alcoholic beverage made by fermenting fresh grape juice. Yeast converts the natural sugars in grapes into alcohol and carbon dioxide, typically producing a drink between 8% and 16% ABV.