Winemaking process with the aim of clarification and stabilization of a wine whereby a fining agent, one of a range of special materials, is added to coagulate or adsorb and precipitate quickly the colloids suspended in it.
Term used as France's shorthand for the country's finest dry sparkling wines made outside Champagne using the traditional method of sparkling winemaking.
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.
Spanish term used both to describe the process of ageing a wine and also for the youngest officially recognized category of a wood-matured wine. A crianza wine must have spent a minimum of six months in cask.
Silicon dioxide (silica), a very common rock-forming mineral. It is seen as glassy, colourless grains in rocks such as granite and sandstone, producing sandy soils of low fertility. It also occurs as opaque white veins filling gashes in bedrocks, which weathering loosens into fragments that become the milky white pebbles seen in many vineyards soils.
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.
French word for the process by which passerillé grapes are dried, shrivelled, or raisined on the vine, concentrating the sugar in grapes-an alternative to wines whose sugars have been concentrated by botrytis.
Sleep, the normal state of vines in winter. This period normally starts with autumn leaf fall, although buds are in a state of so-called organic dormancy from veraison onwards.
A fortified wine made by adding brandy to arrest fermenting grape must which results in a wine, red and sometimes white, that is both sweet and high in alcohol.
Essential element for healthy vine growth. A deficiency of zinc affects the plant's ability to synthesize the hormones auxins, deficiency in which results in a failure of the shoots to grow normally.
