Learning track
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Twenty steps from knowing nothing to buying with confidence. Each one assumes only the ones before it, and none of them assumes you have tasted anything in particular.
You are not sure what tannin means, and you would like that to stop being a problem.
By the end: Read a label, describe what you like in words a shop assistant will understand, and choose a bottle for a specific meal.
20 steps
Each step is a full page in its own right — the same page search would send you to. Nothing here is a summary of something better.
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.