What Wine Is !!

Wine tasting offers us the best route to understanding the messages hidden in the bottle. You can think of them as poetic, or autobiographical.

Poetry comes easily to sensitive palates confronted with great wines. It’s harder work to tease out the facts that create these feelings. After all,as Peynaud puts it so bluntly, “Considered from a chemical point of view, wine is a hydro-alcoholic solution containing 20 to 30 grams of substances in solution, which constitute the extract and give it flavor, and several hundred milligrams of volatile substances, which constitute its odor.” By deciphering these diverse substances, an attentive taster can learn a great deal about the wine they compose.


Every wine is a complex web made up of natural and man-made components. The final taste is determined by forces as non-negotiable as the number of hours of sunlight during the grapes’ growing season, and decisions as personal as whether the grape juice should macerate on its skins for 10 days or two weeks or a month. While no introductory guide can even attempt to link all the ways flavor reflects the particular history of a wine, the more of them tasters can identify, the more complete their appreciation will be. Here are a few of the most important links between the real world and the liquid. I’ll use a hypothetical Cabernet Sauvignon as an example.