Steven Kolpan - WineWise, Second Edition

Weve already suggested that there are three key opportunities to enjoy wine: at home, in a social setting (such as a party), or in a restaurant. We could also add that there are three other fun/functional uses for wine:

• as an aperitifa drink before dinner
• as a drink in a social group or intimate setting, as formal or informal as you like, outdoors or indoors
• as an accompaniment to a meal

With just these considerations, you can easily see that the style of any chosen wine will vary according to its purpose. For example, we appreciate a drink before dinner if it is light and simple and relatively low in alcohol, something that excites the appetite, as opposed to something that is full, heavy, and immediately satisfying; save that wine for dinner.

So wine is made in many different styles to meet our various needs. To begin with, there are three basic styles of wine:

• stillwithout bubbles
• sparklingwith bubbles
• fortifiedwith added alcohol

Strangely enough, both the bubbles and the alcohol in wine come from the same placefermentation. The process of fermentation depends on the presence of yeasts. Some winemakers use yeasts that are naturally present on the skin of the grapes, while others add a specific type of purchased yeast that has been isolated in a laboratory. As soon as the yeasts meet the sugar in grape juice, they start converting that sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. If the carbon dioxide is allowed to drift off into the atmosphere, the wine will be stillwithout bubbles. If the carbon dioxide is retained, the wine will be sparkling (see for how this is done).

The level of alcohol in a wine depends on how much sugar was originally present in the grape juice and on how much of the sugar is converted. If all of the sugar is converted, the wine will contain approximately 12% to 15% alcohol (in other words, 12% to 15% of the liquid contents of the bottle is alcohol). The wine will also be described as dry, meaning not sweet, without residual sugar. But not all wine regions are the same. Some have cool climates, others are warmer. In general, a cool-climate vineyard site will produce grapes with lower sugar levels, creating wines that will have lower alcohol (anywhere from about 8% to 12%). These wines will also have higher acidity, a distinctly crisp, clean feel, with a refreshing, pleasantly sour taste in the mouth (think lemon or grapefruit). In contrast, warmer places produce grapes with higher sugars and lower acidity, leaving the possibility of higher alcohol and a softer, smoother sensation in the mouth (think a blackberry-flavored milkshake).

If the winemaker chooses to stop the yeasts from completing their work, there will be residual sugar left in the wine, creating anything from a lightly sweet taste to a very sweet one. Within our three basic styles (still, sparkling, and fortified), then, there are three subcategories of dryness/sweetness:

• dryno or very little sweetness
• lightly sweetsometimes called off-dry
• very sweet, dessert-like

Different skin-contact time will result in lighter or darker degrees of pigmentation, as shown by these ros wines.