Glossary

The sharp or sour taste in a wine.  Acidity in wine is what causes your mouth to water and make the wine refreshing.

Sugar in grape juice is converted by the action of yeasts into alcohol (most commonly, ethanol or ethyl alcohol).  Alcohol can add body, warmth, and a slight sweetness to wines.  Its most important contribution, of course, is to get us buzzed!

A  balanced wine is where its components (acid, tannin, alcohol, residual sugar and aromatic intensity) compliment each other with no one component ‘sticking out’.  In the vineyard, a vine is balanced when it has an appropriate fruit to leaf ratio for its type.  Ideally, a wine will have moderate shoot and leaf growth (so fruit is neither shaded nor overexposed to sunlight).

The perception of a wine’s ‘weight’ in your mouth.  As an analogy, skim milk, whole milk and heavy cream all have roughly the same flavor but different ‘weights’ in your mouth.  Think of this when assessing whether a wine is light-, medium- or full-bodied.

A scale of sugar ripeness in grapes before harvest (this scale is used in the United States).

This refers to a sparkling wine with 0-12g/L residual sugar (0-1.2% by volume) which generally comes across as dry on the palate.

A wine fault from infection of the cork with TCA (trichloroanisole) smelling of wet newspaper and destroying all fruit on the palate.

In wine speak, this is refers to a wine without residual sugar. Confusingly, in sparkling wine language, Dry (also seen as Sec) is a sparkling wine with between 17-32 g/L residual sugar (1.7-3.2% by volume residual sugar), so more of an off-dry style.

Also seen as Extra-Sec, is a sparkling wine with between 12-17 g/L residual sugar (1.2-1.7% residual sugar by volume), so just delicately sweet.

A wine that lacks coarseness.

(AKA “tears”).   These are flow-lines visible on the sides of a glass after swirling wine.

As compared to the Old World, these are wine-producing countries that have been making wine only more recently and the wine industry is likely more export-focused.

As compared to the New World, these are the wine-producing countries, mainly in western Europe, that have been producing and consuming wine for hundreds of years.

Sugar remaining in a wine. Residual sugar will remain after fermentation stops or when sweetness is adjusted before bottling.