The Encyclopedia of Wine for Beginners

Chapter 1 Does Wine Taste Sour?
Text/Zhiwei Wine Magazine

In the world of wine, there are several concepts that are always confusing: Is wine just red wine?What about the white wine?What is the "dry" in dry red and dry white?Champagne is also wine?Let’s answer these questions one by one.

Wine is red wine?
Friends and relatives often ask this question: "Why is red wine called wine?", and many people have also had this kind of emotion: "So the wine here is red wine!".A French guy I know who understands Chinese especially emphasized, "I know that Chinese people call wine red wine" to show their understanding of Chinese wine culture.It can be seen how entangled the masses of the two countries are with these two terms.

In fact, red wine is a kind of wine. In 1990, Edward Dolnick, a reporter from the American "Health" magazine, pointed out that because of the French's eating habits, especially the frequent drinking of red wine, their risk of cardiovascular disease is far lower than that of Americans.Next, the well-known CBS TV program "60 Minutes" reported the research results of Serge Renaud, a researcher at the French National Institutes of Health.This discovery aroused the strong interest of people in English-speaking countries and even the whole world. Therefore, red wine became popular in Asia. The masses regard red wine as a synonym for wine.

Don't you know that wine is divided into red wine by color, light yellow white wine, and peach red wine.Therefore, when the international wine culture gradually enters China, people are entangled: more and more people are beginning to know the various types of wine, but the wider masses still only recognize the theory of red wine, so there are often articles like this at the beginning of this article A dizzying question arises.

For a long time in school, we all called various electronic dictionaries Wenquxing until more brands of electronic dictionaries appeared.Similarly, with the in-depth spread of wine culture and the increase in the consumption of other types of wine, more and more people will surely understand that red wine is just the abbreviation of red wine and cannot refer to all wines.

dry red and dry white

"Dry red" and "dry white" are words we often hear when discussing wine. It is quite confusing, what exactly does "dry" refer to here?

In fact, this is not a traditional Chinese saying, but directly translated and introduced from Western languages ​​(such as dry in English and sec in French)."Dry" here refers to wines with a sugar content of no more than 4 grams per liter.

So "dry red" and "dry white" refer to red wine and white wine with a sugar content of less than 4g per liter.Although these wines are low in sugar, they don't necessarily taste sweet.Because the sweet taste is not only brought by sugar, but also ingredients such as alcohol and some esters can bring sweetness.

champagne and sparkling wine
Just as red wine is actually a type of wine, champagne is actually a type of sparkling wine.Of course, it can also be seen from the name and raw materials (grapes) of sparkling wine that sparkling wine is also a branch of wine (Wine), just like red wine, white wine and pink wine.

There are many ways to make wine bubbles, but the basic principle is the same: after the grapes are fermented into wine juice, yeast is added to the airtight container for secondary fermentation. This airtight container can be a single wine bottle or a large wine bottle. Stainless steel fermenters, the former is how to make champagne, and the latter is how to make mass-priced sparkling wine.

But not all sparkling wines made by Champagne can become Champagne.The Champagne brand is clearly protected by the Madrid Agreement on International Registration of Trademarks and the World Trade Organization through the application of the Champagne Industry Association. Not only the production areas outside the Champagne region of France cannot use the name "Champagne", even in the 90s of the last century, Yves Saint Laurent released a perfume called "Champagne" in the shape of a sparkling wine cork. Yves Saint Laurent lost the lawsuit and changed its name, and it has been circulated in the legal classroom of brand copyright, and its lingering prestige remains undiminished.Although now, some sparkling wine producing areas (such as California, USA) and some wineries are allowed to continue using the name of Champagne on the wine label for many years (precisely before 2006) , most of the sparkling wines in the world no longer use champagne as part of the wine name under the unremitting efforts of the Champagne producing area.

Therefore, in France, the sparkling wine brewed by the Champagne brewing method outside the Champagne area is called crémant or mousseux sparkling wine, and the sparkling wines of Alsace, Burgundy, and Loire River are all famous Wumart wines. Inexpensive, many sparkling wineries use grapes from the corresponding production areas, and strictly use the same traditional method as the Champagne production area for secondary fermentation. There are many good products, especially some crémant from Alsace and Burgundy. Made with the same Pinot noir and Chardonnay grapes as Champagne, it is well worth a try.

In addition, mass-priced sparkling wine made in large stainless steel sealed tanks can reach unlimited production because there is no restriction on the grape production area. There are also big brands of sparkling wine like this.For example, the Freixenet winery in Spain, as the world's largest sparkling wine production base, has become a symbol of sparkling wine in Barcelona, ​​and there are many high-end brands of Cava, the Spanish version of crémant.

(End of this chapter)