Learning track
Going further
You know what acidity and tannin are. This is about why the same grape tastes different in two places, and what the decisions in a winery actually do.
You can taste the difference between two wines and would like to know where it came from.
By the end: Explain why Chablis and Californian Chardonnay differ, read an appellation as a set of constraints, and predict roughly how a wine will age.
18 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 How grape varieties work
Varieties, clones, crossings and hybrids — and why the distinctions matter.
2 Cool climate and warm climate
The single most useful distinction in wine — what it actually changes in the grape, and where the shorthand breaks down.
3 Terroir
A genuinely useful idea that also carries a lot of unsupported claims.
4 Soil and geology: what actually reaches the glass
Parent rock, soil and root-zone properties are three different things — and the ones that matter act through water and warmth, not flavour.
5 The annual growth cycle
What happens to a vine through the year, and where the risks sit.
6 Harvest and picking decisions
When to pick — the single most consequential decision a producer makes each year.
7 How red wine is made
Fermenting grape juice in contact with the skins, which is where colour and tannin come from.
8 How white wine is made
Pressing the juice off the skins before fermentation, then fermenting the clear juice.
9 Maceration and extraction
Soaking skins in juice to extract colour, tannin and flavour — the main lever on a red wine's structure.
10 Malolactic conversion
Converting sharp malic acid into softer lactic acid — and the source of buttery Chardonnay.
11 Oak ageing
What barrels actually do — flavour, texture, and slow oxygen exposure.
12 New oak and old oak
What changes with each use of a barrel — and what does not.
13 Lees ageing and bâtonnage
Leaving wine on its spent yeast to build texture and savoury complexity.
14 The traditional method
A second fermentation inside the bottle, followed by ageing on the dead yeast.
15 Blending
Combining components to make something better than any of them alone.
16 What ageing does to wine
What actually changes over years — and why most wine should not be kept.
17 The human factor: how much of a wine is decisions
A corrective to over-crediting geography. Picking date, extraction, oak, blending and ageing move a wine further than most site differences do.
18 What actually makes a wine good?
Balance, intensity, complexity, typicity, length and the absence of faults — and where objective assessment stops and preference begins.