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.
Spring and summer time viticultural practice of placing vine shoots in the desierd position to assist in trimming, leaf removal, and harvest operations, and to facilitate the control of vine diseases and vine pests.
Or insert, planks of wood, usually oak, placed in a stainless steel tank and held in position by a metal framework, are a way of imparting oak flavour to wine more cheaply than by fermenting or ageing in barrels since the staves are easily replaced.
Increasingly fashionable and aims at reducing the exposure of must and wine to oxygen in the winery by minimizing or eliminating practices such as racking, lees stirring, and the use of new oak barrels.
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.
The mountain of Reims, or the forested high ground between the Champagne towns of Reims and Épernay. Ist lower slopes are famed for the quality of Pinot Noir base wine they produce.
Occasionally RS, the total quantity of sugars remaining unfermented in the finished wine. This may include both fermentable sugars, mainly glucose and fructose, which have for some reason remained unconverted to alcohol during fermentation, and small amounts of those few sugars which are not readily fermented by typical wine yeast.
Occasionally madeirization, is the process by which a wine is made to taste like Madeira, involving mild oxidation over a long period and, usually, heat.
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.
Prosperous village in Burgundy producing the most powerful red wines of the Côte de Beaune district of the côte d'Or, from the usual Pinot Noir grapes.
Wine trade term, French in origine, for wine sold as futures before being bottled. It comes from the word primeur. Cask samples of wines have customarily been shown in the spring following the vintage.
An instrument for measuring a refractive index, which is related to the amount by which the angle of a light wave is changed when passing through the boundary between two media. The amount of refraction is a convenient way to measure solute concentration of a solution and is widely used in viticultural and winemaking to follow the ripeness of grapes and changes during vinification.
