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.
Literally "individual site" in the wine regions of Germany. Almost all of Germany's vineyards are officially registered as one of these approximately 2600 Einzellagen, which can vary in size from a fraction of 1 ha to more than 200 ha/494 acres. As in Burgundy, for example, the Einzellagen may be divided among many different owners.
Ouillage in French, the operation of refilling any sort of wooden container to replace wine lost through evaporation. The container should be kept full or nearly full.
German term for sweet reserve, the unfermented or part-fermented must much used in the 1970s and 1980s to sweeten all but the finest or driest German wines.
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.
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.
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 simply as botrytis, is the benevolent form of botrytis bunch rot, in which the Botrytis cinerea fungus attacks ripe, undamaged white wine grapes and, given the right weather, can result in extremely sweet grapes.
Known as Bourgogne in French, province of eastern France famous for ist great red and white wines produced mostly from Pinot Noir and Chardonnay rapes respectively.
An expression for that part of the Bordeaux wine region that is on the left bank of the river Garonne. It includes, travelling down river, Graves, Sauternes, Barsac, Pessac-Léognan, Médoc and all the appellations of the Médoc.
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.
Distinctive category of north-east Italian dried-grape wines, a historic speciality of Veneto. The most common forms of Recioto are sweet red Recioto della Valpolicella and the rare sweet white Recioto di Soave and Recioto di Gambellara.
