Wine
8 entries. What a bottle is — what one is like stays with the room.
Term
- VintageStartA vintage is the year the grapes were harvested. It matters because a vineyard's weather is different every year and a wine can only reflect the season it came from — and it matters far less in reliably warm regions than in marginal ones.
- ReservaStartReserva is a legally defined ageing category in Spain and Portugal, and Riserva is one in Italy. Almost everywhere else, "Reserve" on a label is an unregulated marketing word that promises nothing.
- AppellationStartAn appellation is a legally defined growing area whose name may be used only by wine from within it that meets its rules — and those rules usually cover permitted grapes, yields and methods, not merely the boundary.
- TanninStartTannins are polyphenols from grape skins, seeds and stems — and from oak — that bind to proteins in saliva. The drying, grippy feeling they produce is a tactile sensation rather than a taste.
- TerroirStartTerroir is the claim that a wine tastes of where it was grown — the combined effect of soil, slope, climate and local practice on the wine of a particular place. It has no single agreed definition, and it is the organising idea behind European wine law.
Process
- Oak ageingStartOak ageing is holding wine in oak barrels, which does three things at once: it adds compounds from the wood, it allows slow oxygen exchange, and it concentrates the wine slightly through evaporation.
- DecantingStartDecanting is pouring wine out of its bottle into another vessel, for one of two quite different reasons: to leave sediment behind, or to expose the wine to air. Only the first is ever strictly necessary.
- FermentationStartIn wine, fermentation is the conversion of grape sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide by yeast. It is what makes juice into wine, and most of what a winemaker decides is a decision about how to run it.