Wine 101: Wine, Explained Well

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.

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 family that farmed the grapes, rather than by a house that bought them in. The two letters in the fine print say which: RM, récoltant-manipulant, is a grower making wine from their own vineyards; NM, négociant-manipulant, is a house buying fruit. The method is identical. What changes is that a grower's wine comes from one village's parcels and moves with the vintage, where a house blends across the region to hold a style steady.

Crémant is French sparkling wine made by the same traditional method as Champagne, with a second fermentation inside the bottle, but in a French region that is not Champagne. There are eight crémant appellations: Alsace, Bordeaux, Bourgogne, Die, Jura, Limoux, Loire and Savoie. Each uses its own region’s grapes, every bottle is hand-harvested in whole bunches, and the minimum ageing on the lees is nine months against fifteen for non-vintage Champagne.

Champagne is a sparkling wine made only in the delimited Champagne region of northeast France, by starting a second fermentation inside the sealed bottle and ageing the wine on its lees for at least 15 months. Three grapes do almost all of it: Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Meunier. The name is a protected place rather than a style, so the same method used anywhere else must be called something else.

Prosecco col fondo is Prosecco that finishes fermenting inside the bottle it is sold in and keeps its lees, the yeast left behind by fermentation, instead of filtering them out. The name is Veneto dialect for “with the bottom”, meaning the sediment in the base of the bottle. It is dry, softly fizzy at under 2.5 atmospheres, almost always Glera, sealed with a crown cap, and also labeled sui lieviti or rifermentato in bottiglia.

A thorough journey through every stage of white winemaking, from the vineyard to the bottle and the decisions that shape every glass. Introduction White wine is…