Learn
Learn about wine
Wine writing usually assumes you already know. This section does not. It runs in order, each step building on the last, and stops to say plainly when something widely repeated is not actually true.
You do not need to have tasted anything in particular, own any equipment, or know what a tannin is. If a page here uses a word without explaining it, that is a defect, and the glossary is one click away throughout.
Where would you like to start?
Five honest entry points. Pick the one that sounds like you.
I know nothing
Start at the beginning
Twenty steps, in order, assuming nothing at all. Roughly an hour of reading, and you can stop anywhere.
I know what I like
Find more of it
Name a wine you enjoyed and say what you liked about it. WineHQ works outwards from there.
I am holding a bottle
Decode the label
What the words on the front actually mean, scoped to the country that defines them.
I am cooking
Match it to food
Start from the dish. The explanation comes with the recommendation.
I am curious
See how it is made
Every production route from vine to glass, and what each decision does to the wine.
Three tracks
Sequences through pages that already exist. A step is a full page, not a summary of one — the same page search would send you to.
20 steps
Start here
You are not sure what tannin means, and you would like that to stop being a problem.
18 steps
Going further
You can taste the difference between two wines and would like to know where it came from.
21 steps
The mechanisms
You want the mechanism, not the summary, and you want to know where it stops.
The beginner path
Read in this order if you are starting from nothing. Each step assumes only the ones before it.
1 What wine actually is
Fermented grape juice — and why that simple description explains more than it seems to.
2 Red, white and rosé
The difference is skin contact, not grape colour — which is less obvious than it sounds.
3 Dry and sweet
What "dry" means, and why fruity wine is not the same as sweet wine.
4 Body
How heavy a wine feels — the milk analogy that actually works.
5 Acidity
The mouthwatering quality that makes wine refreshing — and the most useful thing to notice.
6 Tannin
The drying grip in red wine — a texture rather than a taste.
7 Alcohol
What the percentage on the label tells you about how the wine will taste.
8 Smelling and tasting wine
Most of what you taste is smell — and describing it is a skill, not a gift.
9 Oak
Where vanilla, toast and butter come from — and why they are not the grape.
10 Grape varieties
A dozen grapes will get you a long way — but the grape alone does not determine the wine.
11 Regions and why place matters
Why European labels name places and everyone else names grapes.
12 Reading a wine label
What is actually useful on a wine label and what is decoration — which words carry legal meaning, which are marketing, and which look identical but are not.
13 Choosing a bottle
Practical tactics for a shop or a wine list when you do not know what you want.
14 Wine and food, simply
Four rules that cover most situations, and permission to ignore them.
15 Serving wine
Temperature is the thing most people get wrong, and it is easy to fix.
16 Storing wine
For most wine, this is much simpler than it is made to sound.
17 When something is wrong with a bottle
What a faulty wine smells like, and what is actually harmless.
18 How wine is made, in outline
The whole process from picked fruit to sealed bottle in one page, before the detail — so the individual steps have somewhere to fit when you read them.
19 Talking about wine without the jargon
Which wine words are useful and which are noise — the small vocabulary that genuinely helps you describe a wine, and the large one that mostly signals membership.
20 Where to go next
How to keep learning once the basics are in place: tasting deliberately, buying to compare rather than to consume, and which qualifications are worth the money.
The confusion that costs people most
Learn
Fruity is not the same as sweet
Why so many people ask for a dry wine and then dislike the one they get — and how to tell aroma from sugar in the glass.