How to read a wine label – Introduction

<v ->At different stages of my professional life,</v> I remember facing various portfolios, selections, and wine lists. And some of them would encounter 100 labels, whereas the others would stretch into thousands. <v ->Wow. That’s very interesting.</v> As a professional, I share a very similar experience. I was lucky enough during my career, to work with extensive wine lists, with big wine cellars, and to give you an example the white wine cellar alone had more than 2000 labels. So when our guests were choosing certain wines we actually had to go and find them. There used to be dozens of bottles that looked exactly the same. Even the vintage was the same.

So we were actually struggling to understand which bottle was the correct one. <v ->Indeed the struggle can be real.</v> And when it comes to the wine labels, you should remember that there are two major types of the wine labels. There are generic labels. Those are the ones which outline the region where the wine was made, but not necessarily state the grape variety. So over here, we’ve got (indistinct), that’s the name of the wine and the producer. Then here comes the vintage. 2014. That’s the year when the grapes were harvested. And later on, we can see Tuscany. That’s the wine producing region in Italy. So this label doesn’t state the grape variety at the front side.

<v ->Very interesting.</v> If we want to state the grape variety on the bottle, here is a typical example of a varietal label. So we’re looking at the wine producer, the Maori Creek, and the actual grape varietal. This one happens to be 100% Sauvignon Blanc. And then we have the region, in this case Marlborough, and the country, New Zealand. Of course the vintage is always mentioned, only this time at the very back of the label. <v ->Very interesting.</v> (wine bottle clatters)