Is just west of, and very much smaller than, the much more famous Sancerre, near the city of Bourges, producing a not dissimilar range of red, white, and rosé wines which can often offer better value.
Is by German law a rosé wine at least 95% of which is made by direct pressing of a single red wine grape variety named on the label (Spätburgunder and Portugieser are especially common).
Increasingly fashionable and aims at reducing the exposure of must and wine to oxygen in the winery by minimizing or eliminating practices such as racking, lees stirring, and the use of new oak barrels.
Qualitätswein is what POD wines are called in German. This is Germany's largest and lowest wine category and in practice includes all those wines once known as QbA. The grapes must originate in one of Germany's 13 official wine regions and reach minimum must weights.
Common winemaking practice, named after its French promulgator Jean-Antoine Chaptal, whereby the final alcoholic strength of a wine is increased by addition of sugar to the grape juice or must, before and/or during fermentation, although if it is added before, the higher sugar level will make it harder for the yeast to multiply.
The principal milk protein, is used by winemakers as a fining agent particularly useful for removing brown colours from white wines. It is used also in the clarification of young wines.
The general term used by winemakers to describe the harmless crystalline deposits that separate from wines during fermentation and ageing. The principal component of this deposit is potassium acid tartrate, the potassium salt of tartaric acid, which has therefore given rise to the name.
The most valuable category of white wines made from the ripest grapes on the best sites of the Wachau in Austria. The category is named after the green lizard that basks in the sun on the Wachau's steep stone terraces above the river Danube. Alcohol levels in the unchaptalized Grüner Veltliners and Rieslings that qualify must be more than 12.5%.
Translates directly from French as a wine that is naturally sweet. Vins doux naturels are made by mutage, by artificially arresting the conversion of grape sugar to alcohol by adding spirit before fermentation is complete.
Winemaking process with the aim of clarification and stabilization of a wine whereby a fining agent, one of a range of special materials, is added to coagulate or adsorb and precipitate quickly the colloids suspended in it.
The result of breeding a new variety by crossing two vine varieties. If the varieties are of the same species, usually the European vinifera species, then the result may also be knowm a an intraspecific cross - Müller-Thurgau would be one example.
Silicon dioxide (silica), a very common rock-forming mineral. It is seen as glassy, colourless grains in rocks such as granite and sandstone, producing sandy soils of low fertility. It also occurs as opaque white veins filling gashes in bedrocks, which weathering loosens into fragments that become the milky white pebbles seen in many vineyards soils.
