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First published 2017
Copyright © Jancis Robinson, 2017
Cover design: gray318
Text design: Claire Mason
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-98363-9
Welcome
Some Simple Explanations
What is wine? / How is wine made? /
Red, white or rosé? / What’s in a name?
Choosing The Right Bottle
How to choose wine from a retailer /
Be adventurous / How to choose from a restaurant wine list
Ten ways to pick the right bottle
Bottles and Labels
Clues from the bottle / Bottle sizes /
Clues from the label / How strong is my wine?
Average alcoholic strengths
How to Taste
Common tasting terms
‘Supertasters’
Matching Wine and Food
Matching food to specific wines /
Matching wines to specific foods / Restaurant rituals
Matching Wine to the Occasion
Crowd pleasers / Bottles to knock socks off /
Bottles as gifts / My favourite champagne growers /
Twenty heart-stopping (and bank-breaking) wines /
What your choices say about you
How Much Should I Pay?
Some under-priced wines / Some overpriced wines /
Wines I would pay over the odds for
Ten common wine myths
Essential Hardware
Glasses / The packaging / Cork, synthetic or screwcap? /
Extracting the cork / Opening a bottle of fizz
Other Kinds of Wine
Sparkling / Fortified / Sweet / ‘Wholemeal’
Top ten tips
How to Handle Wine
Why temperature matters / How to chill and warm wine /
When to open the bottle – and whether to decant /
Wine leftovers / Which wines need time? /
How long to keep wine / How to store wine
Remember that Grape
Grape names—a shortcut to wine knowledge
Most Common White Wine Grapes
Chardonnay / Sauvignon Blanc / Riesling /
Pinot Gris/Grigio
Most Common Red Wine Grapes
Cabernet Sauvignon / Merlot / Pinot Noir /
Syrah/Shiraz / Tempranillo / Nebbiolo /
Sangiovese
The ten most planted grape varieties
Wine Regions You Need to Know About – A Cheat Sheet
France
Bordeaux / Burgundy / Beaujolais/Mâconnais /
Champagne / Northern Rhône / Southern Rhône /
Loire / Alsace / Languedoc-Roussillon / Jura
Italy
Piemonte / Trentino-Alto Adige / Friuli /
Veneto / Tuscany / Marche / Campania /
Puglia / Sardinia / Sicily
Spain
Galicia and Bierzo / Rioja / Ribera del Duero, Rueda and Toro /
Catalunya / Andalucía
USA
California / Oregon / Washington
Rest of the World
Portugal / Germany / Austria /
Northern Europe / Central and Eastern Europe and beyond /
Eastern Mediterranean / Canada / South America / Argentina /
Chile / South Africa / Australia / New Zealand / Asia
New World v. Old World
Wine Jargon
Where to Find Out More
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I’ve been writing about wine for forty years, but every day I learn something new. So I’m not surprised to find that many people find the subject of wine a bit daunting. The aim of this book is to share my knowledge with you and make you a self-confident wine expert in 24 hours by stripping away the non-essentials and concentrating on what really matters.
The best way to absorb all the information in this book is with friends, perhaps over a weekend or on several evenings, and with as many different wines as you can assemble. The more comparisons you can make, the more you will learn. Throughout the book I suggest useful tasting exercises your group may like to undertake, with everyone bringing one or two bottles of the wines proposed. Make sure you have some food to hand – not only for the sake of enjoyment, and for learning which combinations of food and wine work, but also to temper the effects of the alcohol. You won’t become an expert if you can’t remember anything …
A standard bottle contains 75 cl of wine – six generous glasses, eight perfectly respectable ones and up to twenty tasting samples – so you could form quite a large tasting group. For any unfinished bottles, I give tips on how best to store wine leftovers on pp. 51–2.
If you don’t want to organize a wine tasting, use this book to answer your questions about wine as they arise. I suggest, for instance, what sort of wine glasses are likely to give you the most pleasure, how to choose a bottle from a shelf or wine list, whether and how to match wine and food, how to decode a wine label, and how to learn the essentials of wine as quickly and easily as possible.
This book was inspired by someone else’s brilliant idea. Hubrecht Duijker is the best-known Dutch wine writer, and one of the more popular of his 117 books is called Wine Expert in a Weekend, in Dutch.
All these words and the structure of the book are mine rather than Hubrecht’s. But both of us are hugely conscious of the fact that, because wine is now one of the most popular drinks in the world, many, many wine drinkers want to know more about it – without devoting the time and money needed to understand every minute detail and becoming wine professionals. I hope that by sharing my knowledge I can help you get the most out of every glass and bottle.
Jancis Robinson
For Rose,
who shaped, encouraged and guided this book
Fermentation is the key. Under the action of yeast, many sugars can be fermented into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Apple juice can be transformed into cider. Malted cereals can become beer. Even leftover jam can start to ferment.
Grape juice becomes alcoholic when the sugar in ripe grapes is transformed into alcohol and carbon dioxide in the presence of yeast, either the so-called ambient, wild or indigenous yeasts that are present in the atmosphere, or more predictable specially cultured and selected commercial yeasts.
As grapes ripen they gain sugar and lose acidity (and become less hard and less green). The riper the grapes, the more sugars are available to ferment into alcohol and the stronger the resulting wine, unless fermentation is stopped early and some sugar is deliberately left in the wine to make it taste sweeter.
Hotter climates tend to produce grapes with lower acidity and more sugar, which, if the fermentation is completed, will produce wines that are stronger than those from cooler regions. So, the hotter the summer, the riper the grapes and, usually, the stronger the wine. This is why wines made far from the equator tend to be lighter in alcohol. Wines from Puglia on the heel of Italy, for example, are much more potent than those produced in the far north of Italy, while the fledgling (but fast-improving) English wine industry makes wines notably high in acidity.
Once fermentation has transformed sweet grape juice into the alcoholic liquid we call wine, it may be aged before bottling–especially if it is a complex, age-worthy red. Fruity, aromatic whites are often bottled only a few months after fermentation to preserve the fruit and aroma, but more serious wines may well be aged for a further year or two before bottling to marry their different components, most often in containers of various sizes and ages made of oak, a wood that has a particular affinity with wine. The newer and smaller the cask, the more oak flavour will be absorbed by the wine. The fashion today is to minimize obvious oakiness, so older, larger oak containers, or even neutral ones made of concrete, are increasingly common. Easy-to-clean stainless steel tanks are most commonly used for wines designed to be drunk young.
Red The flesh of virtually all grapes is greenish-grey; it is the skin of the grape that determines the colour of the wine. Grapes with yellow or green skins cannot make red wine. Wine is red only if dark-skinned grapes are used to make the juice that becomes wine (known as the ‘must’). The thicker the grape skins and the longer the juice or must is kept in contact with them, the deeper the colour of the red wine that results.
Rosé Most rosé is made pink by leaving the juice in contact with dark grape skins for only a few hours. Rosé is sometimes made from a mix of pale- and dark-skinned grapes, and occasionally from a blend of already fermented white wine with some red. This is an increasingly respectable wine category, and rosé is now drunk throughout the year rather than only in summer.
White Pale-skinned grapes can only make white wine, although with very careful handling, avoiding contact with the skins, it’s possible to make a white wine from dark-skinned grapes. This is sometimes called a Blanc de Noirs, notably in Champagne. Some white wines are made orange by being left in contact with the skins.
Traditionally, wine was called after its place of origin, its so-called ‘appellation’: Chablis, Burgundy, Bordeaux, and so on. But from the mid twentieth century, when new wine regions outside Europe were establishing themselves, more and more wines came to be labelled not geographically but varietally, with the name of the main grape variety from which they were made. Thus labels came to be dominated by names such as Chardonnay, the main grape of Chablis and all other white burgundies, and Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, the main grapes of red bordeaux. (NB I use lower case ‘burgundy’ and ‘bordeaux’ for generic references to the wines themselves rather than to specific regions/appellations.) See pp. 67–76 for my guide to the most important grape varieties and pp. 78–105 for my guide to the most important wine regions, in which I spell out which grapes grow where.