The glossary · The World of Wine, by Nolea

Wine has more jargon per bottle than almost any other drink, and most of it exists to sound impressive rather than to inform. Here is the whole vocabulary, stripped of the mystique. None of these words are hard once someone explains them; the trick is that usually nobody does. Consider this that someone.

ABV: Alcohol by volume, printed on every label. Most table wine sits between 11 and 15 per cent, and the number is a decent clue to the wine’s weight before you’ve even opened it.
Acidity: The tartness that makes your mouth water, like biting a green apple. It keeps wine fresh, makes it food-friendly, and is the single most underrated quality in the glass.
Aeration: Letting air get at the wine, by swirling or decanting. Oxygen softens a young wine’s edges and helps the aromas come out of hiding.
Age ingrat: French for “awkward age”, the sulky teenage phase some wines go through between youthful fruit and mature complexity. Same idea as the dumb phase; the wine grows out of it.
AOC / AOP: France’s appellation system. It guarantees a wine comes from a named place and follows that place’s rules on grapes and methods. It guarantees origin, not deliciousness.
Appellation: A legally defined wine region. The smaller and more specific the appellation, the stricter the rules tend to be.
Aroma: What the wine smells like. Strictly the smells that come from the grape itself, though in practice everyone uses it for everything the nose picks up.
Assemblage: The blending of separate batches or grape varieties into the finished wine. Champagne houses treat it as their signature move.
Astringent: The drying, mouth-puckering feel of heavy tannin, like over-brewed tea. Not a flaw in itself, but tiring when there’s nothing else to the wine.
Attack: The very first impression a wine makes in the mouth, before the middle and the finish. Dramatic word, simple meaning.
Auslese: A German ripeness category meaning “selected harvest”: riper than Spätlese, often sweet, often glorious with age.
AVA: American Viticultural Area, the US version of an appellation. It defines where the grapes grew and almost nothing else, so the winemaker has far more freedom than in Europe.

Balance: When fruit, acidity, tannin, alcohol and sweetness all sit in proportion, with no single element shouting over the rest. The quality every good wine shares, whatever its style.
Barrique: The classic 225-litre French oak barrel. Small enough that the wood leaves a real mark on the wine inside it.
Bâtonnage: Stirring the dead yeast back up into the wine while it rests in barrel. Adds creaminess and body, mostly to whites.
Biodynamic: Organic farming plus a layer of cosmic calendar and cow-horn ritual. The theory raises eyebrows; the vineyards are often superbly farmed anyway.
Blanc de Blancs: A white sparkling wine made only from white grapes, usually Chardonnay. Expect something taut and citrussy.
Blanc de Noirs: A white sparkling wine made from black grapes, pressed gently so the colour stays behind in the skins. Usually rounder and fruitier than Blanc de Blancs.
Blend: A wine made from more than one grape variety, vineyard or vintage. Not a compromise; most of the world’s greatest wines are blends.
Body: The weight of the wine in your mouth, from skimmed milk to full cream. Driven mostly by alcohol, with help from sugar and extract.
Botrytis: The “noble rot” fungus that shrivels ripe grapes and concentrates their sugar. Responsible for Sauternes, Tokaji and other famously sweet wines. Good rot, when it behaves.
Bouquet: The smells a wine develops with age and time in barrel or bottle, as opposed to the fruit it was born with. Leather, mushroom, dried flowers: the second act.
Brett: Short for Brettanomyces, a rogue yeast that gives wine a farmyard, sticking-plaster smell. A whisper of it can add character; a lot of it smells like a stable.
Brut: The standard dry style of sparkling wine. Confusingly, Brut is drier than Extra Dry, because sparkling wine labels were not designed by logicians.

Carbonic maceration: Fermenting whole, uncrushed grapes in a sealed tank of carbon dioxide. It produces soft, fruity, gulpable reds, and it’s the technique behind Beaujolais’s bounce.
Cava: Spain’s traditional-method sparkling wine, made the same way as Champagne at a fraction of the price. One of wine’s reliable bargains.
Chaptalisation: Adding sugar to the juice before fermentation to raise the final alcohol, not the sweetness. Legal in cool climates, banned in warm ones, rarely mentioned at dinner parties.
Charmat method: Making sparkling wine by running the second fermentation in a big pressurised tank instead of each bottle. Faster and cheaper than the traditional method; it’s how Prosecco is made.
Classico: On an Italian label, the original heartland of a region. Chianti Classico is the historic core, not a fancier grade, though usually a good sign all the same.
Claret: The old British name for red Bordeaux. Still in use, mostly by people who also say “luncheon”.
Cold soak: Letting crushed grapes sit chilled before fermentation starts, to draw out colour and fruit without harsh tannin.
Complexity: When a wine offers several layers of flavour that keep shifting as you drink it, rather than one note on repeat. The main thing you pay more for.
Corkage: The fee a restaurant charges to open a bottle you brought yourself. Always ring ahead and ask; policies vary from generous to punitive.
Corked: A wine ruined by a tainted cork, which smells of damp cardboard and wet basement. It affects a few per cent of bottles under natural cork and is nobody’s fault, so send it back without apology.
Crémant: French traditional-method sparkling wine from anywhere that isn’t Champagne: Alsace, Loire, Burgundy and friends. Often the smartest fizz for the money in the shop.
Crisp: Tasting-speak for refreshingly high acidity, usually in whites. If the wine makes you think of biting into something cold and green, it’s crisp.
Cru: French for “growth”, meaning a vineyard or village officially recognised as a cut above. The word does a lot of heavy lifting in Burgundy and Bordeaux.
Cuvée: A specific batch or blend of wine. On a label it mostly means “this particular bottling”, and nothing more official than that.

Decanting: Pouring wine into another vessel, either to leave sediment behind in an old bottle or to give a young one some air. A jug works fine; the swan-shaped crystal is optional.
Demi-sec: “Half-dry” on a French label, which in practice means noticeably sweet. Lovely with cake, misleading with oysters.
Disgorgement: The step in traditional-method sparkling wine where the frozen plug of dead yeast is popped out of the bottle neck. Satisfying to watch, briefly violent.
DOC / DOCG: Italy’s appellation tiers. DOC sets the rules for a region; DOCG adds a G for “guaranteed” and stricter checks. As ever, a promise of origin rather than of pleasure.
Dosage: The small dose of sugared wine added to sparkling wine after disgorgement, which sets its final sweetness level from bone dry to dessert.
Dry: A wine with no perceptible sugar left in it. The opposite of sweet, not the opposite of fruity, which trips up almost everyone at first.
Dumb phase: A stretch in a wine’s ageing when it goes quiet and shows very little, somewhere between youth and maturity. Open a bottle then and you’ll wonder what the fuss was about; wait, and it comes back.

Élevage: French for the “raising” of a wine between fermentation and bottling: its months in tank, barrel or amphora. The upbringing, essentially.
En primeur: Buying wine while it’s still in barrel, a year or two before delivery. Part investment, part act of faith.
Estate bottled: Grown, made and bottled by the same property. A modest reassurance that one set of hands saw the whole thing through.
Extra Dry: On sparkling wine, sweeter than Brut despite the name. File under “labels designed to confuse”, alongside Extra Brut, which really is drier.

Fermentation: Yeast eating grape sugar and turning it into alcohol and carbon dioxide. The one non-negotiable step; everything else in winemaking is editing.
Field blend: Different grape varieties planted together in one vineyard, picked and fermented as one. The old way of hedging your bets, now fashionable again.
Fining: Clarifying wine by adding something that binds to floating particles and drags them down, whether egg white, clay or fish-derived agents. Why not every wine is vegan.
Finish: The flavour that stays after you swallow. A long finish is the classic mark of quality; a short one washes out like cheap squash.
Flabby: A wine without enough acidity to hold itself up. All softness, no spine, forgettable by the second sip.
Flor: The veil of yeast that grows on top of Fino and Manzanilla sherry in barrel, protecting the wine and giving it that salty, almondy tang.
Fortified: Wine with grape spirit added, which raises the alcohol and, depending on timing, keeps some sweetness. Port, sherry and Madeira are the winter coats of the wine world.
Free-run juice: The juice that flows off the grapes by gravity alone, before any pressing. The gentlest, most delicate portion of the harvest.
Fruit-forward: A wine where ripe fruit flavours lead and everything else follows. A style, not a compliment or an insult.

Grand Cru: The top rung of vineyard classification in Burgundy, Alsace and Champagne. In Burgundy it means one small, exalted plot; in Saint-Émilion it means something looser. Always check whose ladder you’re on.
Gran Reserva: Spain’s longest-aged category. In Rioja, that means at least five years of ageing before release, much of it in oak. Wine that arrives ready, so you don’t need a cellar.
Green harvest: Cutting off unripe bunches in summer so the vine concentrates on the ones that remain. Fewer grapes, better grapes, a braver accountant.
Grip: The firm, pleasantly grabby texture of tannin in a red. When someone says a wine has grip, they mean it holds on to your mouth for a moment.

Hot: A wine whose alcohol burns on the finish, out of proportion with the rest. You feel it as warmth in the throat, like a small cough of brandy.
Hybrid: A grape bred by crossing European vines with other species, usually for cold or disease resistance. Long snubbed, now behind some genuinely good bottles in tricky climates.

Icewine / Eiswein: Sweet wine pressed from grapes that froze solid on the vine, so the water stays behind as ice and only concentrated nectar comes out. Harvested at night, in winter, by heroes.
IGT: Italy’s flexible “typical of the region” category, invented partly because the Super Tuscans broke the DOC rules and were too good to punish.

Jammy: Tasting of cooked or stewed fruit rather than fresh, a mark of very ripe grapes from warm places. Some people’s comfort zone, other people’s ceiling.

Kabinett: The lightest of Germany’s Prädikat ripeness levels. Kabinett Riesling is delicate, low in alcohol and one of the most refreshing things ever bottled.

Late harvest: Grapes left on the vine past normal picking so they raisin slightly and gain sugar. The wine ends up sweet, or rich, or both.
Lees: The dead yeast cells that settle after fermentation. Left in contact with the wine, they add a creamy, bready depth, which is why the words “sur lie” are worth spotting.
Legs: The streaks that run down the glass after a swirl. They indicate alcohol and sugar, not quality, so admire them and move on.
Length: How long the flavour lasts after swallowing. Count the seconds if you like; the great wines keep going long after you’ve stopped counting.

Maceration: The time grape juice spends soaking with its skins, which is where red wine gets its colour and tannin. Longer soak, deeper wine.
Magnum: A double bottle, 1.5 litres. Wine ages more gracefully in magnum, and nothing announces a good evening quite like one arriving at the table.
Malolactic fermentation: A second, bacterial conversion that turns sharp malic acid (green apple) into soft lactic acid (cream). Standard for reds; in whites it’s where buttery Chardonnay comes from.
Méthode traditionnelle: The Champagne method: a second fermentation inside each bottle, which traps the bubbles in the wine itself. Slow, laborious, and the reason the best fizz tastes of bread and patience.
Minerality: The stony, chalky, wet-rock impression some wines give. Everyone uses the word, nobody can fully define it, and the wine is not literally drawing flavour up from the rocks. Even so, you’ll know it when you taste a good Chablis.
Mousse: The foam and texture of the bubbles in sparkling wine. A fine, persistent mousse is the mark of careful fizz; big soapy bubbles are the opposite.
Must: Freshly crushed grapes (juice, skins, pips and all) before fermentation turns it into wine. Unglamorous name for the raw material of everything.

Natural wine: Wine made with minimal additions and interventions, often unfiltered and with little or no added sulphur. No legal definition exists, so the term covers everything from thrilling to cider-adjacent.
Négociant: A merchant who buys grapes or finished wine from growers and bottles under their own name. Some of Burgundy’s finest bottles are négociant wines, so it’s no slur.
Noble rot: The friendly name for botrytis when it strikes ripe grapes in the right weather. See Botrytis; bring dessert.
Nose: The smell of a wine, and also the act of smelling it. “It has a lovely nose” is a compliment, not an anatomy lesson.
NV: Non-vintage: a blend of several years, built for consistency. Most Champagne is NV, and the house style you love is the whole point of it.

Oaked: Aged in oak barrels (or, at the budget end, with oak staves or chips), which adds vanilla, spice, toast and structure. It’s a seasoning: great in the right dose, deafening in the wrong one.
Off-dry: Just a touch of sweetness, less than fully sweet, more than bone dry. The secret weapon with spicy food.
Orange wine: White grapes fermented with their skins, the way reds are made. The result is amber-coloured, tannic and savoury, an ancient style back in fashion.
Organic: Grown without synthetic pesticides or fertilisers, certified by an actual body with actual rules, unlike “natural”, which is on its honour.
Oxidised: Wine that has taken on too much oxygen and gone flat, brownish and tired, like an apple left cut on the counter. In sherry it’s done on purpose and called style.

Palate: Either your own sense of taste or the flavours of the wine in the mouth, depending on context. “On the palate” simply means “when you taste it”.
Pét-nat: Short for pétillant naturel: sparkling wine bottled before the first fermentation finishes, so it makes its own bubbles in the bottle. Often cloudy, often crown-capped, often great fun.
Phenolics: The umbrella term for tannins, colour compounds and related bits from grape skins, pips and stems. When winemakers talk about “phenolic ripeness”, they mean the skins taste ready, not just the sugar.
Phylloxera: The vine-killing louse that devastated Europe’s vineyards in the late 1800s. Defeated by grafting European vines onto resistant American roots, which is how almost every vineyard on earth grows today.
Pomace: The skins, pips and stems left over after pressing. Distil it and you get grappa, which is the wine world’s way of wasting nothing.
Prädikat: Germany’s ladder of ripeness levels at harvest, from Kabinett up through Spätlese and Auslese to the liquid-gold rarities. It measures grape sugar at picking, not sweetness in the glass.
Premier Cru: In Burgundy, the rank just below Grand Cru: excellent vineyards, slightly humbler postcode. In Bordeaux the same words sit at the very top. French classification enjoys keeping you alert.
Press wine: The darker, more tannic wine squeezed out of the skins after the free-run juice is drawn off. A little of it deepens a blend.
Punch-down: Pushing the floating cap of grape skins back down into fermenting red wine to extract colour and flavour. Traditionally done by hand, or foot, several times a day.
Punt: The dimple in the bottom of the bottle. It once helped hand-blown bottles stand up, and today its depth tells you precisely nothing about the quality of the wine above it.

Quaffable: Easy to drink in cheerful quantities without much analysis. Faint praise in some mouths, the highest praise on a Tuesday.

Racking: Moving wine off its sediment into a clean vessel. Housekeeping, essentially, with the side benefit of a little fresh air for the wine.
Racy: Bright, high acidity that gives a wine energy and speed across the tongue. Riesling’s favourite adjective.
Reserva / Riserva / Reserve: In Spain (Reserva) and Italy (Riserva) these are legal terms with real minimum ageing requirements. In most of the New World, “Reserve” is legally meaningless; anyone can print it on anything, and plenty do.
Residual sugar: The grape sugar left in the wine after fermentation stops, measured in grams per litre. It’s what makes a wine off-dry or sweet.
Riddling: Gradually twisting and tilting sparkling-wine bottles until the dead yeast collects in the neck, ready for disgorgement. Once done by hand on wooden racks; now mostly by a patient machine.
Rosé: Pink wine, made by letting red grape skins sit with the juice only briefly. Not a blend of red and white; that’s actually illegal for still wine in most of Europe, with Champagne the famous exception.

Saignée: “Bleeding” off some juice from a red fermentation early on. The bled juice becomes rosé; the remaining red gets more concentrated. Two wines, one tank.
Sec: French for dry, except on Champagne labels, where Sec is actually medium-sweet. See also Demi-sec, and perhaps a stiff drink.
Second wine: A separate, cheaper bottling from a top estate, made from barrels or plots that didn’t make the main cut. Often the affordable way to taste a famous address.
Sediment: The harmless grit of tannin and colour that settles in older reds and unfiltered wines. Stand the bottle up, pour steadily, leave the sludge behind.
Skin contact: Time the juice spends with the grape skins, gathering colour, tannin and flavour. Minutes make rosé, weeks make serious red, and on white grapes it makes orange wine.
Solera: The sherry system of stacked barrels where young wine is gradually blended into older, so the final bottle contains fractions of many years. A living archive you can drink.
Sommelier: The wine professional in a restaurant. Their job is to make you happy within your budget, not to judge you, and the good ones light up when you ask for help.
Spätlese: German for “late harvest”, the Prädikat step above Kabinett. Riper and more intense, and can be made dry or sweet.
Structure: The wine’s framework of tannin and acidity, the scaffolding that holds the fruit up and lets it age. A wine with structure feels built rather than poured.
Sulfites: Sulphur dioxide, used since Roman times to keep wine fresh and stable. Nearly all wine contains some, dried fruit contains far more, and it is almost never the cause of your headache.
Sur lie: “On the lees”, meaning aged on its dead yeast for extra texture and depth. The phrase to look for on good Muscadet.

Table wine: Officially, the basic legal category below the appellations. Unofficially, the everyday bottle that does most of the world’s actual wine drinking.
Tannin: The drying, grippy compound from grape skins, pips and oak that you feel on your gums rather than taste. It gives reds their structure and their ability to age, and it’s why big reds love fatty food.
Terroir: The whole package of a place (soil, slope, climate, tradition) and the way it shows up in the glass. The most argued-over word in wine, and still the best explanation for why the same grape tastes different two villages apart.
Texture: How the wine physically feels in your mouth: silky, creamy, grippy, sharp. Half of tasting is touch, once you start noticing.
Toast: How heavily the inside of a barrel was charred, from light to heavy. More toast, more smoke, spice and caramel in the wine.
Trocken: German for dry, full stop. The single most useful word for anyone frightened of German labels, because Trocken Riesling is bone dry and brilliant.
Typicity: How faithfully a wine tastes of its grape and its region, whether a Chablis tastes like Chablis. Prized by traditionalists, cheerfully ignored by rebels.

Ullage: The air gap between the wine and the cork. In old bottles, a low fill line hints that air has been getting in for years, so it’s worth checking before you pay auction prices.
Unfiltered: Bottled without filtering, so the wine may be hazy or throw sediment. Fans say it keeps more flavour; either way, cloudiness alone is not a fault.
Unoaked: Made without oak barrels, so the fruit stands alone. On a Chardonnay label it’s practically a peace offering to people who got burned by the buttery ones.

Varietal: A wine named after and made chiefly from a single grape, as in a “varietal Pinot Noir”. The grape itself is a variety; the wine is a varietal. Nobody will arrest you for mixing them up.
Varietal character: The flavours a grape reliably shows wherever it grows: Sauvignon Blanc’s cut grass, Gewürztraminer’s lychee. The reason blind tasting is possible at all.
VDP: Germany’s association of top estates, with its own vineyard classification stricter than the national law. The eagle logo on the capsule is a quiet mark of quality.
Veraison: The midsummer moment when grapes soften and change colour, from green to gold or purple. The starting gun for ripening.
Vertical tasting: Tasting several vintages of the same wine side by side, to watch one wine move through time. The horizontal version compares different wines from one year.
Vieilles vignes: “Old vines” on a French label. Old vines yield less but deeper fruit, though no law defines how old is old, so the phrase runs on trust.
Vinification: The whole process of turning grapes into wine. Winemaking, in a word that fits better on a technical sheet.
Vintage: The year the grapes were harvested, printed on the label. It matters most in marginal climates, where the weather writes a different story every year.
Viticulture: The farming half of wine: everything that happens to the vine before the grapes reach the winery. Most winemakers will tell you it’s the half that matters more.
Volatile acidity: The sharp, vinegary or nail-varnish note that appears when acetic bacteria get involved. A trace can lift a wine; too much and you’ve got salad dressing.

Whole-cluster: Fermenting entire bunches, stems included, instead of destemmed berries. Adds spice, perfume and a certain wildness, especially in Pinot Noir and Syrah.
Wine diamonds: The little crystals of tartaric acid you sometimes find on the cork or in the bottle. Completely harmless, entirely natural, and a rather flattering name for what is essentially cream of tartar.
Wine thief: The long glass or steel pipette used to steal a taste from a barrel. Best job title in the cellar.

Yeast: The microbe that does the actual winemaking, converting sugar to alcohol. Some producers add a cultured strain; others let the wild yeasts on the grapes take their chances.
Yield: How much fruit a vineyard produces, usually in hectolitres per hectare. Lower yields generally mean more concentrated wine, which is why the good stuff comes from stingy vines.

Zesty: Bright, citrussy and alive with acidity. If a white wine wakes you up like the smell of a just-peeled orange, that’s zesty. And that’s the whole alphabet.

now you can nod along anywhere.