The label and slander department: Somewhere in wine country, a winemaker is lamenting the truth: he or she shed blood, sweat, and tears crafting a delicious merlot from a difficult vintage, but it was passed over by a customer in favor of a bottle with a wallaby on the label.
Wine Girl is dedicated to putting a stop to that winemaker’s pain. Reading a wine label, as opposed to just emoting over the puns and the pictures, is actually very simple. And because it’s essential to choosing a proper wine at the store or from a wine list, I would like to advise you to do two things:
1) Blind yourself like Ulysses against the siren’s call of those cute animals. A decade or so ago a kangaroo hooked us on cheap Australian shiraz and hopped back to Oz with the global wine market in its pouch. Now an ocean of forgettable plonk is bottled with copycat — or dog, horse, even lizard — labels. Truth is, the key to interpreting a wine label has little to do with the pictures. Instead, it lies in the answer to an easy, if unexpected, question:
2) Ask yourself, am I looking at (or for) a wine from the “new world” or “old world?” Countries with historically new wine industries (think former colonies like the U.S., Australia, Chile, South Africa) label their wines differently than those with ancient winemaking traditions (e.g., France, Germany, Italy, Spain). In the case of new-world wines, because most are named after the grapes from which they’re made, the first thing you should look for on the label is the grape variety, like “cabernet sauvignon” or “chardonnay.” Helpfully, after the winery logo, the biggest words on the label of a California wine, for example, are usually the name of the grape that makes up a majority of its blend. Then, in small type, you’ll see the vintage year, alcohol content, geographical origin, and other tertiary information. Ignore all that for now. You’re looking at a new world wine, it’s a varietal, and you are identifying which grapes are in the brew.
Almost in reverse, old-world wines are named after the place they come from. So the biggest words on the label of most European wines — dwarfing even the winery name sometimes — will be the region, village, or even the vineyard where the grapes grew. That’s why when you pick up a bottle of Italian red from the region south of Florence, for example, a well-known winery may have made it from 100 percent sangiovese grapes, but the label will blare: “Chianti.” (Yes, Chianti is a region, not a vine.) In fine print you’ll see information about the vintage, winery, alcohol content, bottle volume. Perhaps no mention of sangiovese at all. Don’t fret: all you need to know is, this is a Chianti, pass the pizza.
Of course there are exceptions. Some old-world but new-school wineries — especially those with their eyes on an export market — are starting to label their wines as varietals, giving grape names marquee status on the label. And German labels … don’t even get me started on how to decipher the label on a Trockenbeerenauslese. I’ll post on that later. But you have a rule of thumb: either you’re looking at, for example, a “Champagne” (region name) from France or a “merlot” (grape name) from Chile.
Beyond this basic rule, Wine Girl will leave you with a few wine-label tricks: first, just because a label says “cabernet sauvignon” doesn’t mean it’s cabernet only. In the U.S., by winery can label a varietal as such if has at least 75 percent of the grape named. Relatedly, don’t be afraid if you see “red table wine” on a new-world label, instead of the grape name. Some winemakers don’t like to be fenced in by the 75 percent rule, so they bust out and make (often delicious, often expensive) blends they’re then forced by law to call by this unromantic term. Finally, the label may state a mere “11.5% alcohol,” but don’t get all crazy on us, thinking you can have three glasses and still zip around on your scooter. Wineries are allowed to err by plus or minus 1.5 percent, which is a lot, so that light summer refresher you’re holding might pack a wallop.
