Wine Tasting 101: Glossary
What the heck does terroir actually mean?
Learn a few commonly used wine terms and you’ll be well on your way to effectively decoding sommelier-speak.
We’ve discussed the logic behind the swishing and sniffing happening at a wine tasting, now’s our chance to unleash our inner word nerds. The language often used to describe wine can seem obscure or intimidating, but it certainly doesn’t have to be! Some commonly heard wine words are discussed, below.
A varietal is a wine produced from a single variety of grape. There are over 10,000 wine grape varieties, however almost all are a single species! An easy analogy can be made from breeds of dogs—they’re all one species, but there are “purebreds” (single varietal wines) and “mixed breeds” (blended wines).
Bouquet is a wine tasting term that refers to the myriad scents and smells developed during again. This term is often used by wine critics and aficionados in concert with “nose” and “aroma” to describe the smells of a wine. For instance, when opening a bottle of Pinot Noir, you might describe the scents and smells as evoking a bouquet of leather, cigar box, black cherries and dried leaves. Again, this term seems fancier than it is. Now that you know how to use the term, try it out during your next (virtual) tasting with friends.
Terroir is a French word that simply means “a sense of place.” When someone says that a wine exhibits terroir, it means that the wine they are drinking has a flavor imparted by the area it was produced. The premise is that the land and the climate where the grapes are grown imparts unique characteristics into the fruit that would not come from growing the same varietal elsewhere in the world. This is not that much different than how certain fruits and vegetables may taste different based on where they are grown.
