Essential Facts about Wine

Huon Hooke

From Reader's Digest Magazine

As our fascination with wine increases, the thirst for information about it also soars. Wine-appreciation courses are booming, the wine-book market is doing a brisk trade and tastings, dinners and exhibitions hosted by winemakers are commonplace. But much of what is spoken about wine assumes the audience has a certain level of knowledge, with communicators often accused of talking over the heads of the public. Not any more. To make every party this side of Christmas more palatable, here are 20 vital facts – tips you can follow, or details to fast-track you to connoisseur status

1. Australians are the English-speaking world’s biggest wine drinkers, consuming 21.1 litres each annually – but we rank 16th overall.

2. We tend to drink our white wines too cold and our reds too warm. Serving a wine too cold suppresses its fruit flavour and exaggerates oak character and tannin. Serving it too warm exaggerates alcohol but softens tannin – the stuff that causes red wine to have a puckering effect in the mouth. A good rule of thumb is 15 to 18 degrees for reds (cool room temperature) and eight to 12 degrees for whites (moderately chilled).

3. Letting wine breathe releases all of its flavours, but it doesn’t happen if you simply draw the cork and let the bottle stand. You must aerate the wine, which is best achieved by decanting – pouring it into another container.

4. About two million bottles of wine leave Australia every day heading for 111 international markets – about 60 per cent of our wine production. Australia is the fourth biggest exporter of wine in the world but only the sixth-largest producer after France, Italy, Spain, Argentina and the US.

5. Our most popular grape, shiraz, was once thought to have originated in Iran – a Muslim country where few people drink wine. France’s Rhone Valley is considered the more likely source.

6. Grape varieties do not determine sweetness: winemakers do. Any grape can be made into sweet or dry wine.

7. Most wine bottles have a punt – the indent on the bottom. There are many theories as to how the punt originated and what it’s for, such as: it facilitated stacking in olden times; the earliest bottles were more stable upright if they were punted than if they had a flat base; and the punt collects the sediment in old reds and makes decanting easier.

8. The most valuable Australian wine of any vintage is the original 1951 Penfolds Grange. A bottle sold for $56,977 at an Oddbins auction in June 2003.

9. Swirling wine in the glass is not just an affectation – it helps you smell it better. Swirling coats the inside of the wine glass with liquid which increases the surface area, giving off more aroma.

10. About 52 per cent of the Australian wine consumed here comes in a bag and a cardboard box. Twenty years ago it was 64 per cent.

11. South Australia is our biggest wine producing state. Fosters Wine Estates is the biggest wine company – it was formed when Fosters launched a successful takeover and combined Southcorp with its own wine arm, Beringer Blass.

12. Grapes and wine share flavour compounds with various herbs, spices, vegetables, other fruit and organic matter. This is why tasters use terms such as “peach,” “vanilla” and “capsicum.”

13. A corked wine is one that has been tainted by an undesirable chemical compound in the cork – the main one is trichloroanisole or TCA. It has nothing to do with fragments of broken cork – a common misconception.

14. Champagne is generally white, but it is made mostly from red grapes (pinot noir and pinot meunier).

15. How the bubbles get into the Champagne bottle is simpler than it may seem. When wine ferments, it produces carbon dioxide. When it ferments in a bottle, the gas is trapped. Popping the cork releases the pressure and causes the gas to come out of its dissolved state, creating an effervescing wine.

16. If wine was a living thing, it would spoil. Winemakers don’t want live microbes active in wine.

17. The juice of most wine grapes is clear. Red wines are fermented with their skins in order to extract colour.

18. A relatively small proportion of the oceans of wine produced every year improve with age: mostly full-bodied reds, rich sweet whites, fortifieds and a few outstanding dry whites.

19. Wine is a very natural substance compared to other alcoholic drinks. Australian winemakers cannot add water, sugar or alcohol to table wines.

20. More than 100 new wine producers start up in Australia every year.

Essential Facts about Wine

From Reader's Digest Magazine

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