The most valuable category of white wines made from the ripest grapes on the best sites of the Wachau in Austria. The category is named after the green lizard that basks in the sun on the Wachau's steep stone terraces above the river Danube. Alcohol levels in the unchaptalized Grüner Veltliners and Rieslings that qualify must be more than 12.5%.
The most prestigious wine estate in Burgundy, based in Vosne-Romanée. The Domaine, as it is frequently called, is co-owned by the de Villaine and Leroy families and produces only Grand Cru wines.
Before concrete, stainless steel, and other inert materials replaced wood as the most common material for wine fermentation vessels and storage containers in the 1960s, each wine region had ist own legion of barrel types. Even today such terms as feuillette, tonneau, and fudre may be used to measure volumes of wine long after the actual containers themselves have been abandoned.
A common plant acid, abundant in some fleshy fruits such as lemons, but rare in grapes. The grape is unusual among fruits in that its major acid is tartaric acid, rather than citric acid, whose concentration in the juice of most grape varieties is only about one-twentieth that of tartaric acid.
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.
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.
French word for various systems of pumping over. In winemaking terms it is the pumping of the liquid in the fermentation tank over the cap of skins and solids during the red wine fermentation.
Red winemaking process which transforms a small amount of sugar in grapes which are uncrushed to ethanol, without the intervention of yeasts, it is used typically to produce light-bodied, brightly coloured, fruity red wines for early consumption, most famously but by no means exclusively in the Beaujolais region of France.
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.
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.
