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.
Known as Bourgogne in French, province of eastern France famous for ist great red and white wines produced mostly from Pinot Noir and Chardonnay rapes respectively.
Spring and summer time viticultural practice of placing vine shoots in the desierd position to assist in trimming, leaf removal, and harvest operations, and to facilitate the control of vine diseases and vine pests.
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.
French term for racking, or moving clear wine off ist sediment and into a clean container. It can also be used for the wine serving process of decanting.
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.
Winemaking technique of fermenting grape juice or must in small barrels rather than in a larger fermentation vessel. The technique is used principally for white wines because of the difficulty of extracting through a barrel's small bung-hole the mass of skins and seeds which necessarily remains after red wine fermentation.
Village in the Côte de Beaune district of Burgundy's Côte d'Or more famed for its white wines from the Chardonnay grape than for its equally plentiful red wines from Pinot Noir.
Appellation abutting Gevrey-Chambertin in the Côte de Nuits district of Burgundy, producing red wines of a similar style to ist neighbour, though currently of lesser fame.
Italian term meaning literally "repassed", for the technique of adding extra flavour, and alcohol, to Valpolicella by refermenting the young wine on the unpressed skins of Amarone wines after these dried-grape wines have finished their fermentation in the spring, and racked off.
An instrument for measuring a refractive index, which is related to the amount by which the angle of a light wave is changed when passing through the boundary between two media. The amount of refraction is a convenient way to measure solute concentration of a solution and is widely used in viticultural and winemaking to follow the ripeness of grapes and changes during vinification.
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.
The final addition to a sparkling wine which may top up a bottle in the case of traditional method wines, and also determines the sweeteness, or residual sugar, of the finished wine. A mixture of wine and sugar syrup.
Term in common parlance, but not in federal law, in the US that suggests loosely that the wine came entirely from grapes farmed on the winery's own property.
The much-imitated French system for the designation and control of important geographical names not only of wines, but also of spirits, as well as many foods.
Red-brown loam or clay directly over well-drained limestone found typically in regions with a mediterranean climate. Such soils are found in southern Europe, North Africa and parts of Australia.
