What is a quaffable wine?

While looking around reading up on wine, because this is one of my favourite past times, I stumbled across something that I couldn’t get over. In fact, the more I read about it, the more unbelievably hilarious it got. I told so many friends about it and then I realised “Hold on, I have a wine blog now, I can tell everyone too!” So here we are dear reader, do I have a story for you. But first I should ask a question: do you know what a quaffable wine is?

Anyway, before I review a wine I always like to read up on it online and see what others think of it. So I was reading a review by a ‘wine reviewer’ on a website. He seems to review a lot of wines for the distributor as I’ve seen his name pop up in a few places. So I read his review and did a double-take.

He said the wine had quaffability. What the quaff? I had no idea what this meant, so much so that rather than Googling it straight away, I sat there in disbelief. This was a prime example of exactly the sort of stuff I’m trying to completely avoid with this blog, and here it was clear as day. So what is a quaffable wine?

The purpose of this blog for me is to make wine easy and accessible. I want to take the wine away from the stuffiness that the industry is so well known for, and good wine! It isn’t about confusing terms and difficult to understand tasting notes, it is whether the wine tastes good and if you’d buy it again. Perhaps even what it goes well with, who knows?

So there we had it. A prime example of a word used to describe a wine that had me scratching my head. I’m not sure if I’m the only one here, so at risk of sounding stupid, I looked into what it meant and where this word came from.

What is a quaffable wine?

So I looked up the word quaffable to figure out exactly what this wine critic was talking about. ‘Quaff’ is from the 16th century and of Irish origin. It is the Irish Gaelic word for cup turned Scottish. However, no one knows if this is the actual origin of this word in wine. ‘Quaffable’ is used prominently throughout the wine industry but I can’t find where this started. Surely at some point, someone decided to start using it for some reason or another, but there isn’t much on how this came about!

Regardless, in wine speak, this wine term means a drinkable wine. It is usually a wine that doesn’t cost much but is easy to drink. It’s used to describe a wine without the complexity and with nothing special, but that really depends on who’s using it. So although it can mean it is a great, cheap wine for drinking now, it’s also used as an insult.

So if you hear someone use the word quaffable, they are talking about the wine being easy drinking and well priced. It is really a fancy word for that $10 bottle you grab to go with your pizza. But, like a lot of wine terms, it really overcomplicates things!

Keep it simple, please

I think the funniest thing about this word is that it describes those wines that are for the masses. Quaffable wines are well priced with simple flavours. They are the wines that you can easily pick up in a bottle store for cheap, but go down easy. Actually, quaffable wines are some of my favourites to drink. These wines need to be featured more in wine news. They are the ones that are the hardest to find because of their price, but also sometimes the most enjoyable.

Quaffable is not only hard to understand the meaning of. More importantly, it shuts off the average wine drinker from understanding wine. It is that it is a fancy word describing the wines that the average wine drinker enjoys! It is actually trying to make it more complicated than it is.

So if you are reading a wine review that mentions this term, at least now you’ll know what it is. But rather than turning your nose up, like I’m sure some critics would embrace the quaffable wines! These are the good ones that you can enjoy on a weeknight or with a simple meal. They don’t cost an arm and a leg, but they are still great wines!

Are there any other wine terms you find confusing? I’d love to feature them! Let me know in the comments below.