How Tannins Really Affect Your Wine, From Taste to Texture

Anyone who has read a wine review or attended a tasting have heard about tannins or tannic structure or grip, so what exactly are they?       Supple. Velvety. Grippy. Opulent. Smooth. Chewy. Silky. Anyone who has read a wine review or attended a tasting has seen or heard these descriptors and many more, which are usually applied to tannins or tannic structure. Discussions of them are omnipresent, but what exactly are tannins?   While we often hesitate to become overly geeky when describing wine, understanding tannins helps to appreciate how… Read More

Understand tasting notes: Tasting notes decoded

Don’t get caught out at tastings – use our handy glossary to understand tasting notes and talk about wine like an expert. Fruity Apricot Apricot is in the same spectrum as other stone fruits, such as peach, indicating a certain ripeness in the grapes, and used to describe white wines – although not as ripe as in hot climate wines, where the fruit descriptors become tropical, like pineapple and mango. Apricot is often associated with the grape Viognier, along with peach and blossom, found in the Rhône and increasingly in the New World. Richer Albariño, from North… Read More

What Does ‘Extraction’ Mean in Wine?

The word ‘extraction’ is used a lot, but what does this term even mean? We turned to the experts for an explanation. If you’ve ever heard a winemaker wax poetic about “extraction” and been lost amid stanzas on fermentation and polymerization, you’re not alone. Extraction is a hard topic to master for wine drinkers and winemakers alike. We asked industry professionals to shed some light on this oft-confusing term. What is extraction in wine? “Extraction is the way to take things like flavor and color and other components out of the grapes… Read More