Wine For Dummies®, 7th Edition
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Copyright © 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018955849
ISBN 978-1-119-51273-8 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-51276-9 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-51270-7 (ebk)
We love the amazing variety of wines in the world, and we love the way wine brings people together at the table. We want you and everyone else to enjoy wine too — regardless of your experience or your budget.
We will be the first to admit that the trappings of wine — the ceremony, the fancy language, the paraphernalia — don’t make it easy for regular people to enjoy wine. You have to know strange names of grape varieties and foreign wine regions. You have to figure out whether to buy a $20 wine or an $8 wine that seem to be pretty much the same thing. You usually even need a special tool to open the bottle when you get it home — although screwcaps are being used more and more for many wines.
All the complications surrounding wine will not go away easily because wine is a very rich and complex field. But you don’t have to let the complications stand in your way. With the right attitude and a little understanding of what wine is, you can begin to buy and enjoy wine. And if, like us, you decide that wine is fascinating, you can find out more and turn it into a rewarding hobby.
We hate to think that wine, which has brought so much pleasure into our lives, could be the source of anxiety for anyone. We want to help you feel more comfortable around wine. Some knowledge of wine, gleaned from the pages of this book and from our shared experiences, will go a long way toward increasing your comfort level around wine.
Ironically, what will really make you feel comfortable about wine is accepting the fact that you’ll never know it all — and that you’ve got plenty of company. You see, after you really get a handle on wine, you discover that no one knows everything there is to know about wine. There’s just too much information, and it’s always changing. And when you know that, you can just relax and enjoy the stuff.
Because wine is always changing, we have written a seventh edition of Wine For Dummies. We have added some new countries and regions, have updated prices, and updated information on the latest vintage years. If you already have a previous edition, you might be wondering whether you need this book. We believe that you do. We wrote the first edition of Wine For Dummies in 1995, and the world of wine has changed tremendously since then. It has even changed a lot since our sixth edition in 2016:
We wrote this book to be an easy-to-use reference. You don’t have to read it from cover to cover for it to make sense and be useful to you. Simply turn to the section that interests you and dig in. Note that sidebars, which are shaded boxes of text, consist of information that’s interesting but not necessarily critical to your understanding of the topic.
Also, when this book was printed, some web addresses may have needed to break across two lines of text. If that happened, rest assured that we haven’t put in any extra characters (such as hyphens) to indicate the break. So, when using one of these web addresses, just type in exactly what you see in this book, pretending that the line break doesn’t exist.
We assume that you picked up this book for one of several reasons:
We also assume that you don’t have a lot of ego invested in wine — or maybe you do, and you’re buying this book “for a friend.” And we assume (correctly, we hope) that you are someone who doesn’t appreciate a lot of mumbo jumbo and jargonistic language about wine — that you’re someone who wants straight talk instead.
The pictures in the margins of this book are called icons, and they point out different types of information.
A bargain’s not a bargain unless you really like the outfit, as they say. To our tastes, the wines we mark with this icon are bargains because we like them, we believe them to be of good quality, and their price is low compared to other wines of similar type, style, or quality. You can also interpret this logo as a badge of genuineness, as in “This Chablis is the real deal.”
Some issues in wine are so fundamental that they bear repeating. Just so you don’t think that we repeated ourselves without realizing it, we mark the repetitions with this symbol.
This odd little guy is a bit like the 2-year-old who constantly insists on knowing “Why, Mommy, why?” But he knows that you may not have the same level of curiosity that he has. Where you see him, feel free to skip over the technical information that follows. Wine will still taste just as delicious.
Advice and information that will make you a wiser wine drinker or buyer is marked by this bull’s-eye so that you won’t miss it.
There’s very little you can do in the course of moderate wine consumption that can land you in jail — but you could spoil an expensive bottle and sink into a deep depression over your loss. This symbol warns you about common pitfalls.
Unfortunately, some of the finest, most intriguing, most delicious wines are made in very small quantities. Usually, those wines cost more than wines made in large quantities — but that’s not the only problem; the real frustration is that those wines have very limited distribution, and you can’t always get your hands on a bottle even if you’re willing to pay the price. We mark such wines with this icon, and hope that your search proves fruitful.
As if all the great information in this book weren’t enough, you can go beyond the book for even more! Check out this book’s online Cheat Sheet for a quick guide to wine pronunciation, tips on how to buy wine with confidence, and more. Just go to www.dummies.com and search for this book’s title.
We recommend that you go to Chapter 1 and start reading there. But if you don’t have time because you’re about to head out to a fancy restaurant, then begin at Chapter 7. If you already have bottle in hand, wine in glass, and want to know more about what you’re about to sip, turn to Chapter 4 to decode the words on the label, and then consult the index to find the regional section that corresponds to your wine, to read about the wines of that area. Or — because so many wines today are named after grape varieties — start with Chapter 3, which explains the major grape varieties for wine.
In other words, start wherever you wish, closer to the beginning if you’re a novice and closer to the middle if you know something about wine already. On the journey of wine appreciation, you get to decide how far to go and how quickly — and you get to choose the route to get there. The final destination is pleasure.
Part 1
IN THIS PART …
Gain some basic wine knowledge to get you started on your wine-loving journey.
Find out the techniques involved in tasting wine.
Become familiar with the different varieties of grapes and the wines they make.
Understand how to read wine names and labels.
Take a sneak peek at the process of winemaking.
Chapter 1
IN THIS CHAPTER
What wine is
Why color matters
Differences among table wine, dessert wine, and sparkling wine
We know plenty of people who enjoy drinking wine but don’t know much about it. (Been there, done that ourselves.) Knowing a lot of information about wine definitely isn’t a prerequisite to enjoying it. But familiarity with certain aspects of wine can make choosing wines a lot easier, enhance your enjoyment of wine, and increase your comfort level. You can master as much or as little as you like. The journey begins here.
Wine is essentially just fermented fruit juice. The recipe for turning fruit into wine goes something like this:
Pick a large quantity of ripe grapes from grapevines.
You could substitute raspberries or any other fruit, but 99.9 percent of all the wine in the world is made from grapes, because grapes make the best wines.
Crush the grapes somehow to release their juice.
Once upon a time, feet performed this step.
In its most basic form, winemaking is that simple. After the grapes are crushed, yeasts (tiny one-celled organisms that exist naturally in the vineyard and, therefore, on the grapes) come into contact with the sugar in the grapes’ juice and gradually convert that sugar into alcohol. Yeasts also produce carbon dioxide, which evaporates into the air. When the yeasts are done working, your grape juice is wine. The sugar that was in the juice is no longer there — alcohol is present instead. (The riper and sweeter the grapes, the more alcohol the wine will have.) This process is called fermentation.
Fermentation is a totally natural process that doesn’t require man’s participation at all, except to put the grapes into a container and release the juice from the grapes. Fermentation occurs in fresh apple cider left too long in your refrigerator, without any help from you. We read that even milk, which contains a different sort of sugar than grapes do, develops a small amount of alcohol if left on the kitchen table all day long.
Speaking of milk, Louis Pasteur is the man credited with discovering fermentation in the 19th century. That’s discovering, not inventing. Some of those apples in the Garden of Eden probably fermented long before Pasteur came along. (Well, we don’t think it could have been much of an Eden without wine!)
Now if every winemaker actually made wine in as crude a manner as we just described, we’d be drinking some pretty rough stuff that would hardly inspire us to write a book about wine. But today’s winemakers have a bag of tricks as big as a sumo wrestler’s appetite, which is one reason no two wines ever taste exactly the same.
Obviously, one of the biggest factors in making one wine different from the next is the nature of the raw material, the grape juice. Besides the fact that riper, sweeter grapes make a more alcoholic wine, different varieties of grapes (Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, or Merlot, for example) make different wines. Grapes are the main ingredient in wine, and everything the winemaker does, he does to the particular grape juice he has. Chapter 3 covers specific grapes and the kinds of wine they make.
Of course, grapes don’t grow in a void. Where they grow — the soil and climate of each wine region, as well as the traditions and goals of the people who grow the grapes and make the wine — affects the nature of the ripe grapes and the taste of the wine made from those grapes. That’s why so much of the information about wine revolves around the countries and regions where wine is made. In Parts 3 and 4, we cover all the world’s major wine regions and their wines.
Your inner child will be happy to know that when it comes to wine, it’s okay to like some colors more than others. You can’t get away with saying “I don’t like green food!” much beyond your sixth birthday, but you can express a general preference for white, red, or pink wine for all your adult years.
Whoever coined the term white wine must have been colorblind. All you have to do is look at it to see that it’s not white; it’s yellow (sometimes barely yellow, sometimes a deeper yellow). But we’ve all gotten used to the expression by now, so white wine it is.
White wine is wine without any red color (or pink color, which is in the red family). Yellow wines, golden wines, and wines that are as pale as water are all white wines.
Wine becomes white wine in one of two ways: First, white wine can be made from white grapes — which, by the way, aren’t white. (Did you see that one coming?) White grapes are greenish, greenish yellow, golden yellow, or sometimes even pinkish yellow. Basically, white grapes include all the grape types that aren’t dark red or dark bluish. If you make a wine from white grapes, it’s a white wine.
The second way a wine can become white is a little more complicated. The process involves using red grapes — but only the juice of red grapes, not the grape skins. The juice of almost all red grapes has no red pigmentation — only the skins do — therefore, a wine made with only the juice of red grapes can be a white wine. In practice, though, very few white wines come from red grapes. (Champagne is one exception; Chapter 15 addresses the use of red grapes to make Champagne.)
In case you’re wondering, the skins are removed from the grapes either by pressing large quantities of grapes so that the skins break and the pulpy juice flows out — sort of like squeezing the pulp out of grapes, the way kids do — or by crushing the grapes in a machine that has rollers to break the skins so that the juice can drain away.
You can drink white wine anytime you like, but typically, people drink white wine in certain situations:
We serve white wines cool, but not ice cold. Sometimes, restaurants serve white wines too cold, and we actually have to wait a while for the wine to warm up before we drink it. If you like your wine cold, fine; but try drinking your favorite white wine a little less cold sometime, and we bet you’ll discover it has more flavor that way. In Chapter 8, we recommend specific serving temperatures for various types of wine.
In this case, the name is correct. Red wines really are red. They can be purple red, ruby red, or garnet, but they’re red.
Red wines are made from grapes that are red or bluish in color. So guess what wine people call these grapes? Black grapes! We suppose that’s because black is the opposite of white.
The most obvious difference between red wine and white wine is color. The red color occurs when the colorless juice of red grapes stays in contact with the dark grape skins during fermentation and absorbs the skins’ color. Along with color, the grape skins give the wine tannin, a substance that’s an important part of the way a red wine tastes. (See Chapter 2 for more about tannin.) The presence of tannin in red wines is actually the key taste difference between red wines and white wines.
Red wines vary quite a lot in style — partly because winemakers have so many ways of adjusting their red winemaking to achieve the kind of wine they want. For example, if winemakers leave the grape juice in contact with the skins for a long time, the wine becomes more tannic (firmer in the mouth, like strong tea; tannic wines can make you pucker). If winemakers drain the juice off the skins sooner, the wine is softer and less tannic. And heating the crushed grapes can extract color without much tannin.
Traditionally, people have consumed red wine as part of a meal or with accompanying food rather than as a drink on its own, but plenty of red wines today are made to taste delicious even without food.
Thanks to the wide range of red wine styles, you can find red wines to go with just about every type of food and every occasion when you want to drink wine. The one exception is times when you want to drink a wine with bubbles: Although bubbly red wines do exist, most bubbly wines are white or pink. In Chapter 9, we give you some tips on matching red wine with food.
One sure way to spoil the fun in drinking most red wines is to drink them too cold. Those tannins can taste really bitter when the wine is cold — just as in a cold glass of very strong tea. On the other hand, way too many restaurants serve red wines too warm. (Where do they store them? Next to the oven?) If the bottle — or the glass of wine — feels cool to your hand, that’s a good temperature. For more about serving wine at the right temperature, see Chapter 8.
Rosé wine is the name that wine people give to pinkish wine. These wines are made from red grapes, but they don’t end up red because the grape juice stays in contact with the red skins for just a short time — only a few hours, compared to days or weeks for red wines. Because this skin contact (the period when the juice and the skins intermingle) is brief, rosé wines also absorb very little tannin from the skins. Therefore, you can chill these wines and drink them as you’d drink white wines.
Rosé wines are not only lighter in color than red wines, but they are also lighter in body (they feel less heavy in your mouth; Chapter 2 explains body and other taste characteristics of wine). They have a fascinating range of color, from pale orange to deep pink, depending on the grape variety that they come from. Some rosé wines are actually labeled “White [red grape name]” — “White” Zinfandel is the most common — as a marketing gimmick.
The rosé wines that call themselves white are fairly sweet; they are sometimes referred to as blush wines, although that term rarely appears on the label. Wines labeled rosé can be sweetish, too, but some wonderful rosés from Europe, including Champagne (and quite a few from the United States) are dry (not sweet). The popularity of rosé wines has varied over the years, but in the decade of the 20-teens, it is at an all-time high (about five times as popular in the U.S. now, compared to 30 years ago). Even hard-core wine lovers are discovering what a pleasure — not to mention what a versatile food partner — a good rosé wine can be.
Your choice of a white wine, red wine, or pink wine will vary with the season, the occasion, and the type of food you’re eating (not to mention your personal taste). Choosing a color usually is the starting point for selecting a specific wine in a wine shop or in a restaurant. As we explain in Chapters 6 and 7, most stores and most restaurant wine lists arrange wines by color before making other distinctions, such as grape varieties, wine regions, or taste categories.
Certain foods can straddle the line between white wine and red wine compatibility — grilled salmon, for example, can be delicious with either a rich white wine or a fruity red. But your personal preference for red, white, or rosé wine will often be your first consideration in pairing food with wine.
Pairing food and wine is one of the most fun aspects of wine, because the possible combinations are almost limitless. (We get you started with the pairing principles and a few specific suggestions in Chapter 9.) Best of all, your personal taste rules!
We sometimes play a game with our friends: We ask them, “Which wine would you want to have with you if you were stranded on a desert island?” In other words, which type of wine could you drink for the rest of your life without getting tired of it? Our own answer is always Champagne, with a capital C (more on the capitalization later in this section).
In a way, Champagne is an odd choice because, as much as we love Champagne, we don’t drink it every day under normal circumstances. We welcome guests with it, we celebrate with it after our team wins a Sunday football game, and we toast our cats with it on their birthdays. We don’t need much of an excuse to drink Champagne, but it’s not the type of wine we drink every night.
What we drink every night is regular wine — red, white, or rosé — without bubbles. These wines have various names. In the United States, they’re called table wines, and in Europe, they’re called light wines. Sometimes, we refer to them as still wines, because they don’t have bubbles moving around in them.
In the following sections, we explain the differences among three categories of wines: table wines, dessert wines, and sparkling wines.
Table wine, or light wine, is fermented grape juice whose alcohol content falls within a certain range. Furthermore, table wine isn’t bubbly. (Some table wines have a very slight carbonation but not enough to disqualify them as table wines.) According to U.S. standards of identity, table wines may have an alcohol content no higher than 14 percent; in Europe, light wine must contain from 8.5 percent to 14 percent alcohol by volume (with a few exceptions). So unless a wine has more than 14 percent alcohol or has bubbles, it’s a table wine or a light wine in the eyes of the law.
The regulation-makers didn’t get the number 14 by drawing it from a hat. Historically, most wines contained less than 14 percent alcohol — either because the juice didn’t have enough sugar to attain a higher alcohol level or because the alcohol killed the yeasts when it reached 14 percent, halting the fermentation. That number, therefore, became the legal borderline between wines that have no alcohol added to them (table wines) and wines that might have alcohol added to them (dessert or fortified wines; see the next section).
But today, the historical phenomenon of 14 percent alcohol as the natural limit of fermentation is, well, history. Many grapes now grow in warm climates where they become so ripe and have so much natural sugar that their juice attains more than 14 percent alcohol when fermented. The use of gonzo yeast strains that continue working even when the alcohol exceeds 14 percent is another factor. Most red Zinfandels, Cabernets, and Chardonnays from California — and many red wines from almost everywhere — now have 14.5 or even 15 to 16 percent alcohol. While U.S. government definitions have not changed, the U.S. tax code has recognized the new reality by raising to 16 percent the upper limit for a wine to be taxed at the table-wine rate of excise tax, which is lower than for a higher-alcohol dessert wine. (Read about dessert wines in the next section.)
Here’s our own, real-world definition of table wines: They’re the normal, non-bubbly wines that most people drink most of the time.
Some wines have more than 14 percent alcohol because the winemaker added alcohol during or after the fermentation. That’s an unusual way of making wine, but certain parts of the world, like the Sherry region in Spain and the Port region in Portugal, have made quite a specialty of it. We discuss those wines in Chapter 16.
Dessert wine is the legal U.S. terminology for such wines, even if they’re not necessarily sweet and not necessarily consumed after dinner or with dessert. (Dry Sherry is categorized as a dessert wine, for example, but it’s dry, and we drink it before dinner.) In Europe, this category of wines is called liqueur wines, which carries that same unfortunate connotation of sweetness.
We prefer the term fortified, which suggests that the wine has been strengthened with additional alcohol. But until we get elected to run things, the term will have to be dessert wine or liqueur wine.
Sparkling wines are wines that contain carbon dioxide bubbles. Carbon dioxide gas is a natural byproduct of fermentation, and winemakers sometimes decide to trap it in the wine. Just about every country that makes wine also makes sparkling wine. In Chapter 15, we discuss how sparkling wine is made and describe the major sparkling wines of the world.
In the United States, Canada, and Europe, sparkling wine is the official name for the category of wines with bubbles. Isn’t it nice when everyone agrees?
Champagne (with a capital C) is the most famous sparkling wine — and probably the most famous wine, for that matter. Champagne is a specific type of sparkling wine (made from certain grape varieties and produced in a certain way) that comes from a region in France called Champagne. It is the undisputed Grand Champion of Bubblies.
Unfortunately for the people of Champagne, France, their wine is so famous that the name champagne has been borrowed again and again by producers elsewhere, until the word has become synonymous in people’s minds with practically the whole category of sparkling wines. For example, until a recent agreement between the United States and the European Union (E.U.), U.S. winemakers could legally call any sparkling wine champagne — even with a capital C, if they wanted — as long as the carbonation was not added artificially. Even now, those U.S. wineries that were already using that name may continue to do so. (They do have to add a qualifying geographic term such as American or Californian before the word Champagne.)
For the French, limiting the use of the name champagne to the wines of the Champagne region is a cause célèbre. E.U. regulations not only prevent any other E.U. country from calling its sparkling wines champagne but also prohibit the use of terms that even suggest the word champagne, such as fine print on the label saying that a wine was made by using the “Champagne method.” What’s more, bottles of sparkling wine from countries outside the European Union that use the word champagne on the label are banned from sale in Europe. The French are that serious about Champagne.
To us, this seems perfectly fair. You’ll never catch us using the word champagne as a generic term for wine with bubbles. We have too much respect for the people and the traditions of Champagne, France, where the best sparkling wines in the world are made. That’s why we stress the capital C when we say Champagne. Those are the wines we want on our desert island, not just any sparkling wine from anywhere that calls itself champagne.
When someone tries to impress you by serving a wine labeled “champagne” that’s not French, don’t fall for it. Nearly all the respectable sparkling wine companies in the United States refuse to name their wines champagne, out of respect for their French counterparts. (Of course, many of California’s top sparkling wine companies are actually owned by the French — so it’s no surprise that they won’t call their wines champagne — but many other companies won’t use the term, either.)