Wine is one of the oldest alcoholic beverages that humans have made. It’s usually made with some form of a grape product. The grape juice is fermented over a varying amount of time to let the liquid become alcoholic.
As common as the drink is, there is so much that is confusing about it. Immediately when trying to order you have stuff like red or white, there are things like dry wines, woody wines, and many more that you’ll probably encounter. Trying to guess the right wine is like trying to guess where the ball will land at EasyBet Casino.
Completely random – maybe you’ll hit it right and maybe you won’t.
Luckily not everything that they say about wine is made up and bogus. Although some of it is, more on that later. A lot of the terms used when describing it means something that you can actually tell when drinking it.
You just need to know those different terms and you’ll already be ahead of the curve on understanding what the heck a bottle of wine actually is.
The Different Types of Wine
Red and white wines are the two most common distinctions when it comes to wine. It’s also the most apparent.
Red wines are made with darker colored grapes and are a darker color, usually red (as the name suggests). Although there are varieties in the colors as there are with most things in life.
White wines are usually made with lighter colored grapes, these are the green ones and ones like those. This wine is almost always clear.
I said usually made with lighter-colored grapes for white wines because clear white wine can actually be made with dark-colored grapes too. It is just a longer, harder process that is usually a trade secret among the brands that produce white wine this way.
Whether there are any benefits from making white wine with dark grapes I can’t tell you, as I’ve never had it.
The difference between these wines isn’t just related to their color though. Red wines are much sweeter than their white alternatives.
Red and white aren’t the only types of wines, of course, they are just the most common.
Probably the next most common type of wine is a fruit wine. Fruit wine is the general term for any wine that isn’t made out of grapes. It can be made out of apples, berries sometimes, and even some types of flowers.
Fruit wines are generally less common than normal wines due to the difficulties of producing them. Most fruits generally lack the correct ratio of sugar, proper acidity levels, and the correct amount of yeast that wine needs to ferment correctly.
This is why grapes are by far the most common fruit used to make wine. It’s simply one of the only things that have an almost perfect ratio of these three components that make making wine so easy and good.
Another type of wine is called mead. You might have assumed that mead is a completely different drink from wine (if you knew what mead was before this of course) but it’s actually produced in much the same way as regular wine.
The biggest difference between mead in wines is that instead of just fermenting in water it is fermented in a mixture of honey and water.
This makes mead much sweeter than normal wine while also changing its color slightly. Any drink that is made with honey in it is counted as mead.
Wine Terminology
There are a lot of terms thrown around when it comes to wine. Some of them are straightforward descriptions, but others… less so.
Some of the wine terms that connoisseurs use are practically gibberish to people who aren’t versed in wine.
You have words like dry, which has nothing to do with the liquid itself but the fact that the wine isn’t very sweet. There are strange ones like astringent wine, which is the term they use for very bitter wine that leaves an aftertaste.
Of course, to wine tasters, wine can also just be bitter, which is something different from it being astringent somehow.
Letting a wine breath is also a common thing mentioned. This is letting the opened wine sit for a bit to do something with the air that apparently makes it taste better. This has tried to be noticed through blind taste tests but the results are inconclusive.
The best term used for wine is of course the bung and the bunghole. This is the term used for the plug put into the wine barrel and the hole that the plug is shoved into.
There is nothing rude about shoving bung plugs into bungholes.
There are lots of terms for wine that are almost contradictory or seem redundant. Like the word hot when referring to wine has nothing to do with temperature, it is entirely based on the amount of alcohol in the wine.
The wine world must have nothing to do with a requirement to drink it but the grape mush that the wine is fermented from. It’s all very confusing.
Are wine terminology only used because of tradition and a need to sound better than those that are not wine connoisseurs? Who can really say? You gotta decide that for yourself.
