THE WTFS OF THE WINE WORLD

By TYLER BALLIET

del.ico.us | digg it! | reddit!

print | email | 2 Comments

Ever since Wine Riot in April, we've been hosting wine events every week at wine shops and restaurants around the city. Our goal is to demystify the often-confusing terms, laws and general practices that surround this delicious beverage. While hosting these numerous tastings, various questions tend to come up time and time again. In this, I hope to dissect a few terms that even we deem "confusing as all hell."

Appellation: In the simplest of terms, this means the place the wine came from. It could be as broad as saying "California" or as specific as "Corton-Charlemagne," which is a small plot of land on a west-facing hill in Burgundy, France. Each country has a governing body that decides the boundaries for each appellation and the laws—yes, there are laws that dictate who can grow what and where. In the United States, we call our regions "American Viticultural Areas" (AVA). In France, it's the Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée (AOC) and in Italy, it's the Denominazione di Origine Controllata (DOC). Next time you get a bottle of wine or attend a tasting, look for these acronyms being thrown around. When you see these on the label, it just means these guys are legit and adhere to the local laws.

Residual Sugar: This is a technical term winos throw around that should probably never be used outside of a professional setting. It's really just a way to quantify the amount of sugar in the wine, measured in grams per liter (g/L). Alcohol is created when yeast eats sugar and poops alcohol. To make a dry red wine, like California Cabernet, the yeast eats most of the sugar, leaving around 1 g/L. However, this term does become slightly useful to the consumer when talking about sweet wines because Sauternes, like the famous Chateau d'Yquem, rock upwards of 150 g/L of sugar, and Tokaji, the Hungarian dessert wine, can hit as high as 900 g/L. While it's far simpler for folks like you and me to rate things on a "dry," "kind of sweet" or "really sweet" scale, this term seems to find its way into restaurant and wine shop conversations all the time.

Tannin: This is that bitter taste that makes your cheeks pucker, found in some red wines. It's the same taste as biting into an unripe apple or eating a pomegranate. The flavor comes from the grape skins, which are soaked in the wine during the fermentation process to give a wine its red color and to add distinct flavors. Tannins are considered positive traits of a fine wine that can be aged for decades. As the wine gets older, the tannins will slowly fade, softening the flavors. Additionally, recent scientific studies tout the health benefits of tannins. People who live in the regions where overly tannic wines are produced and guzzled, like southwestern France and Sardinia, tend to live longer on average—yet another fantastic justification to drink more wine.

This is the first of a regular column to field questions about wine. Curious about something? Email tyler@thesecondglass.com.

DRINK MORE WINE!

THESECONDGLASS.COM