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Wine Glossary

Understanding the words and terms used to describe the wine making process is critical to improving your craft.  Even the vernacular used to describe flavors, mouth feel and aromas when tasting wine can be confusing.  This comprehensive glossary to the words of wine will help.  

• Tannic: Describes wines too high in tannin.

• Tannin: A substance found in the skins, stems and seeds of grapes (grape tannins) and imparted by oak barrels (wood tannins) that in balance can lend structure, texture and ageability to red wines.

• Tarry: Aromas and flavors that suggest fresh tar.

• Tart: A term that can be applied to wines that are too high in acid, or made from under ripe grapes.

• Taste: The impressions formed by wine in the mouth, perceived as bitter, sweet and sour.

• Terroir: French term referring to the growing conditions in the vineyard, including climate, soil, elevation, slope, drainage, topography etc.

• Texture: How a wine feels in the mouth.

• Tight: Can refer to a certain lean or underdeveloped quality of the wine in its aromas, flavor or structure.

• Tirage: The process of bottling a cuvee with the addition of active yeast and sugar in order to induce a second fermentation. The carbonation produced by this second fermentation is trapped in the bottle, producing the effervescence of Champagnes and sparkling wines.

• Topping Up: The process by which evaporated wine is replaced in the barrel or carboy.

• Varietals: Term for grape variety.

• Varietals Character: The unmistakable set of sensory characteristics attributable to a grape variety.

• Vegetal: Aromas or flavors that suggest vegetables.

• Vin de Pays: French phrase for country wine. Lower status than AOC.

• Vinification: The activity of making grape juice into wine.

• Vintage: The year in which a wine's grapes were harvested; sometimes referring to the grape harvest itself.  Vintage designations are only given to Champagnes whose cuvees contain wines made from a single year's harvest. As with Port, a Champagne vintage is only declared in a year of exceptional quality.

• Viticulture: The activity of growing grapes.

• Vitis Vinifera: Species to which most of the worlds wine grapes belong.

• Weight: Impression of heft and volume of the wine in the mouth.

• Well-balanced: Used to describe wines in which all component--alcohol, acid, tannin (if any) and sugar (if any)--relate to each other in such a way that none seems dominant.

• Wood Tannin: Describes tannins attributable to barrel aging, rather than the grapes.

• Yeast: One-celled organisms responsible for turning grape juice into wine.