Wine 101: Wine, Explained Well

Terroir is the way a place shapes a wine: its climate, soil, landscape and living things, and the knowledge the people there built up about farming it and making wine from it. This guide checks seven common beliefs about terroir against published research, from soil and old vines to microbes, climate change and wine law.

Minerality is a word tasters use for wines that seem to taste of stone, chalk or salt. Wine experts do not agree on what it means. Studies link it to acidity, less fruit and sulfur compounds that form during winemaking, and the minerals in the soil are not the source.

Lambrusco is a family of red grape varieties from Emilia-Romagna, and the lightly sparkling wine made from them, mostly red and frizzante. This guide covers the grapes, the appellations, tank and bottle fermentation, the sweetness terms, the Riunite years and how to serve it.

Orange wine is white wine made the way red wine is made: white grapes ferment with their skins for days, weeks or months, which gives the wine an amber color and tannin. It is also called amber wine or skin-contact white, and it contains no oranges. This guide covers the official definitions, how it is made, its history in Georgia and Friuli, the grapes, and how to serve it.

Most wine is dry because yeast turns the sugar in grape juice into alcohol, and a fermentation left to finish usually keeps under about 2 grams of sugar per liter. This guide covers how wines keep their sugar, the EU scales for still and sparkling wine, the Riesling scales, Port and Tokaji, and which wines have added sugar.

Some natural wine has faults, and it has always depended on the producer. Many natural producers add little or no sulfur dioxide, which leaves their wine more exposed to oxidation, Brettanomyces and mousiness. Where a fault begins is also partly a matter of taste.

A wine fault is a smell or taste the winemaker did not intend, caused by a microbe, a chemical reaction or bad storage. The eight covered here are cork taint, volatile acidity, ethyl acetate, mousiness, Brettanomyces, oxidation, reduction and heat damage: what causes each one, how it smells and tastes, and which ones air can fix.

In the European Union, a wine sold under a protected name (DOCG and DOC in Italy, AOC in France, DO in Spain) has to pass a lab analysis before it reaches the market, and for most of these names a tasting panel too. Every lot of Italian DOCG and every lot of Rioja goes through both exams. Table wines such as Vin de France skip the exam but still have to meet EU limits. In the US, TTB does not require a lab test for an ordinary imported wine; it tests wines it buys from stores.

A pét-nat, short for pétillant naturel, is a sparkling wine bottled before its first and only fermentation has finished, so the carbon dioxide from that fermentation is trapped inside the bottle. It has one fermentation where Champagne has two, nothing added to sweeten it, a crown cap instead of a cork and cage, and it is usually cloudy because the lees, the yeast left behind by fermentation, are never removed.

Grower Champagne is Champagne made by the grower who farmed the grapes, rather than by a house that buys them. Two letters in the fine print tell you which one you are holding: RM for a grower, NM for a house. Both make it by the same method.

Crémant is French sparkling wine made by the same method as Champagne, in one of eight French wine regions outside Champagne. The traditional method is identical: a still base wine, a second fermentation sealed inside the bottle, months on the lees, then disgorgement and a cork under a wire cage. The place and the grapes change.

Champagne is a sparkling wine made in one delimited region of northeast France, about 90 miles east of Paris, by starting a second fermentation inside the sealed bottle and leaving the wine on its lees for at least 15 months before release. Only wine from this region may be called Champagne. Sparkling wine made the same way elsewhere uses another name.