Increasingly popular and currently fashionable winemaking practice known to the Ancient Romans whereby newly fermented wine is deliberately left in contact with the lees. This period of lees contact may take place in any container, from a bottle to a large tank or vat-although a small oak barrel is the most common location for lees contact.
Term used as France's shorthand for the country's finest dry sparkling wines made outside Champagne using the traditional method of sparkling winemaking.
The process of deliberately maturing a wine after bottling, whether for a few weeks as a conscious effort on the part of the bottler to allow the wine to recover from bottle sickness or, in the case of very fine wines, for many years in order to allow the wine to mature.
French term for punching down, the winemaking operation of breaking up and submerging the cap of skins and other solids during red wine fermentation to stop the cap from drying out.
French term meaning "bled" for a winemaking technique which results in a rosé wine made by running off, or "bleeding", a certain amount of free-run juice from just-crushed dark-skinned grapes after a short, prefermentation maceration.
Sometimes known as grey mould and sometimes just rot, the malevolent form of botrytis bunch rot and one of the most harmful of the fungal disease that attack vines. In this undesirable bunch rot form, the botrytis cinerea fungus rapidly spreads throughout the berry flesh and the skin breaks down.
Is the winemaking operation of storing a fermented wine in wooden barrels to create ideal conditions for the components of the wine to evolve and so that the wood imparts some oak flavour.
Most important village in the Côte Chalonnaise district of Burgundy. While most of the production is in red wines made from Pinot Noir, a small quantity of unusually scented white wine from Chardonnay is also made.
Widely misused term meaning strictly the climate within a defined and usually very restricted space or position. In viticulture, it might be at specific positions between rows of vines, or distances above the ground.
French for "white of whites", may justifiably be used to describe white wines made from pale-skinned grapes. As the great majority of them are. A real significance only when used for white sparkling wines.
Or Melon de Bourgogne, the most planted grape variety in the Loire valley, planted on 10798ha/26671acres in 2011 and famous in only one respect and one region, Muscadet.
Very large group of highly reactive chemical compounds of which phenol is the basic building block. These include many natural colour pigments such as the anthocyanins of fruit and dark-skinned grapes, most natural vegetable tannins such as occur in grapes, and many flavour compounds.
The lightest in terms of must weight and alcohol among the trio of dry white wine categories in Austria's Wachau region-specifically for unchaptalaized grapes of 73 to 83° Oechsle which result in wines no more than 11% alcohol. The name comes from a feathery grass species indigenous to the local vineyard terraces.
