Wine Bluffers Terms

The words you need to know to impress your wine drinkers!

1. DRY
Technically a ‘dry’ wine is one where all the sugar from the grapes has been converted into alcohol but, as with all things wine it’s a bit more complicated than that in reality. That’s mainly because people often interpret the fruit flavours in wine as ‘Sweet’ even if the wine has very little sugar left in it.

2. SWEET
In the weird but wonderful world of wine, the term’Sweet’ never, ever refers to quaffing wines. The insider’s term for these wines is ‘Stickies’, so if you want to sound like you really know what you are talking about use that term instead.

3. TANNIN
If you ever swirled a slug of wine around your mouth and been left with that dry feeling on your gums, then you’ll know what tannins are.

4. MINERALITY
Some of the best wines in the world (Chablis & Sancerre, for example) are lauded by experts for their ‘minerality’. In layman’s terms, you might recognise it as reminiscent of wet stone, crushed rock or even chalk.

5. BUTTERY
Buttery- or some prefer the term creamy- wines taste that way due to a process called malolactic fermentation, which gives a softer, richer texture. Most red wines in the world undergo this fermentation but it is a white wine- Chardonnay- that is best known for it.

6. BALANCE
If you ever find yourself stumped when it comes to describing a wine, calling a wine “balanced” is a complimentary catch-all term for those awkward moments.

7. CORKED
Let’s be clear: if the cork itself breaks or looks shoddy in some way the wine is still not “corked”. A corked wine is one that has been infected with a trichloroanisole, or TCA for short, and is easily identifiable as the wine itself will smell of damp cellars or wet dog.

8. ACIDITY
Three primary acids are present in wine grapes- tartaric, citric and malic- but you don’t really need to know that. Suffice to say you can measure a wine’s acidity by how much your mouth waters after a sip and/or how much your lips pucker when tasting it.

9. BOUQUET
If someone asks you about a wine’s bouquet then what they are really saying is: what aromas can you get from the wine? What’s it’s “nose”? Or, put more simply “what does it smell like?”

10. WOODY.
When people talk about wine that is “woody” they generally mean one that has been aged in oak – you might also detect it as flavours of vanilla, coffee or even smoke.

Hope that helps a little!

We have a reasonable selection of Red, White & Rose wines available by the bottle or in 250 & 175ml  measures.

We also have Prosecco by the bottle and in 200ml single serve bottles… enjoy!