Since starting the blog I’ve learnt a lot about wine and loved doing it. There is so much to discover, but it can also be hard to know where to begin. If you’re just getting into wine where do you even start? It can be a little overwhelming, but never fear! Learning about wine should be fun and certainly not hard. So to get you started, I’ve pulled together five articles on some Wine 101 topics into this beginners guide to wine. These guides cover a couple of the basics of learning about wine, and should help you learn more about it!
Below are little tastes of the full guides that you can click through to. This isn’t a comprehensive guide but should get you started!
Wine body guide – what is light, medium and heavy?
One of the first things that helped me understand wine was looking at wine body. So in this beginners guide to wine, we’re going to start right here!
Now I know most of you would never discuss someone’s body and might be appalled that we would analyse the body of our beautiful wine. Because all wines are beautiful right? Well never fear, we aren’t talking about the wine bottle having a pear vs hourglass shape.
Wine body is not a discussion of physical appearances but rather how the wine feels inside your mouth when you take a sip. You’d think that would be called something like taste right? Well, taste is more about the different flavours within the wine, whereas the body is just about heaviness.
There are three main categories of wine body across all the wine varieties, making it quite simple to remember. Because we are talking about heaviness, thankfully this makes the names a lot easier to remember: light body, medium body and heavy body.
Learn more about wine body in the full guide here.
The difference between taste and flavour in wine
A beginners guide to wine also wouldn’t be complete without demystifying some of those weird wine terms you hear in tastings.
It can get really confusing when you are tasting wine, particularly when you are talking to other people about it. We’ve all been there. You’re at a wine tasting and some guy swirling his glass says “Ohh yes I really get the blackberry flavour”. Meanwhile, you stick your nose in your glass and you’re not getting anything. It’s hard enough to identify flavours in wine, but to then explain can make it more difficult! And what does everyone mean when they talk about taste and flavour in wine? And where does aroma come in?
You’d think that taste and flavour are the same things right? I mean they sort of mean the same thing. But in wine, there is a distinct difference in these terms that is around to trip everyday drinkers up! But to understand the difference between these terms, we have to understand the difference between taste, aroma and flavour. Basically:
- Aroma – what you smell
- Taste – what you, well, taste
- Flavour – the combination of these two
Learn more about what each of these important components of tasting is here.
Sweetness in wine
There are lots of ideas around about what a sweet wine is. There are also very few people that would rather enjoy a soft drink than drink a super sweet wine. However, some of the sweetest dessert wines actually have the same amount of sugar as a soft drink! So think about that next time you choose lemonade over Moscato!
The problem with sweetness in wine is that it all comes down to perception, but this is widely impacted by the balance in the wine. The combination of tannin and acidity in the wine will balance out sweetness, changing the perception of how the wine tastes. The problem is that on top of this we all have differing ideas of what ‘ too sweet’ is, similar to how everyone has a different perception of flavours that they like. This means that one person might like something that is sweeter, but the other might hate it. It’s really for the best, so we have a bit of variety in our lives, right?
The problem with sweetness is also that it is hard to spot on a label. Some wines such as sweet dessert wines are easy to pick out from a crowd because of their bottles and prices, but when it comes to drinking wine they really look exactly the same to dry wines. So picking a bottle based on the appearance of the wine is not the way to go!
Learn more about identifying sweetness in wine here.
Acidity in wine
When I first started learning more about wine, I heard a lot about acidity. I thought to myself, what? Acid in wine? Why on Earth would anyone want to taste acidity in wine? Well, I learnt very quickly that acidity in wine is actually essential to how we taste wine. Just like with tannin, whether there is plenty of acidity, or none at all, really impacts the taste of wine and your personal preference for it.
Acidity is one of the four fundamental traits of wine, coming together with sweetness, alcohol and tannin to produce the taste in a glass. Acid gives the wine a tart or sour taste – so the more acid in the wine the more tart it will be. Ever taste a wine that feels refreshing on the tongue and makes you want to take another sip? Well, the culprit is the wine’s acidity. It makes you salivate just like with other acidic food and drink (lemonade is a great example), so makes you want more.
Read the full guide to learn more here.
What is a tannin?
A beginners guide to wine wouldn’t be complete without understanding one of the weirdest terms in wine – tannin.
Something I talk about a lot on the blog when I’m describing wine is tannins. I often use this word to describe what the wine tastes like, and how it sits in your mouth. However, this blog is all about bringing wine back to basics, and not using these sorts of wine terms. I’ve realised I am falling victim to using the industry terminology, and that not all my readers may understand exactly what I am talking about!
When it comes to wine tannins, they can come from two places: the grape or wood. They come from the stems, seeds and skins of the grape, and for wood, these come from either exposure to oak barrels or chips added to the wine. This is why you’ll find red wines more tannic than white because their creation requires more grape skin contact to get their colour. They are also more likely to be aged in oak barrels, so generally get a double dose of these tannins! Depending on how long they are in contact with the grape skin, seeds or stems also impacts the tannins in the wine: the longer this process is, the more tannic the wine.
Learn more about tannins in this full guide here.