Adapted by the champagne industry for wines made without (much) added sweetening or dosage. The upper limit for the resiudual sugar of a brut champagne has been reduced from 15 to 12 g/l.
Important French port on the Garonne River. Bordeaux gives ist name to a wine region that includes the vineyards of the Gironde département and, as such, the wine region that produces more top -quality wine than any other region.
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.
Term used on labels which has very specific meaning in the Unitet States, where an estate-bottled wine must come from the winery's own vineyards or those on which the winery has a long lease; both vineyards and winery must be in the geographical area specified an the label.
French term for racking, or moving clear wine off ist sediment and into a clean container. It can also be used for the wine serving process of decanting.
Appellation for France's finest and certanly most complex vins doux naturels, made from vertiginous terraced vineyards above the Mediterranean at the southern limit of Roussillon.
Japanese term derived from two words meaning "delicious" and "essence" and used to refer to what some consider to be the fifth primary taste. It is variously described as "savory" or "meaty".
German term for young wine popularly consumed before botteling-generally cloudy and often still fermenting-and typically referred to in Austria as Sturm or Heuriger.
The general term used by winemakers to describe the harmless crystalline deposits that separate from wines during fermentation and ageing. The principal component of this deposit is potassium acid tartrate, the potassium salt of tartaric acid, which has therefore given rise to the name.
Or bâtonnage, as it is called in French, is the once fashionable winemaking operation of mixing up the lees in a barrel, cask, tank or vat with the wine resting on them. It is an optional addition to the process of lees contact and is often employed, particularly for whites which have undergone barrel fermentation. Usually done with a stick. Stirring up the lees in the barrel also effects oak flavour.
Term used as France's shorthand for the country's finest dry sparkling wines made outside Champagne using the traditional method of sparkling winemaking.
Widely used in filtration, is a naturally occuring, highly porous, chalky textured sedimentary rock made mainly of silica and consisting of fossilized remains of diatoms, a type of hard-shelled algae.
Coupage in French, is a practice that was once more distrusted than understood. In fact almost all of the world's finest wines are made by blending the contents of different vats and different barrels.
The much-imitated French system for the designation and control of important geographical names not only of wines, but also of spirits, as well as many foods.
Important commercial centre on the River Saône and capital of the Mâconnais dynamic district of Burgundy which produces considerable quantities of white wine and some red.
Is used in much the same way as the word cave in French, for any sort of wine-producing premises wheather above or below ground. A German wine specifying a Keller rather than a Weingut on the label is usually the produce of a merchant rather than an estate. In Alto Adige, the Italian Tyrol, Kellereigenossenschaft is a common name for one of the many wine co-operatives.
In common viticultural terms, the offspring of two varieties of different species, as distinct from a cross between two varieties of the same species, which is also known as an intraspecific cross.
Small town in the Tuscan Maremma made famous by Marchese Mario Incisa della Rocchetta, who planted Cabernet Sauvignon vines for a house wine a early as the 1949s an his San Guido estate, labelling the resulting wine Sassicaia.
