Wine

Fermented, not distilled

Wine is grape juice that has fermented. Yeast eats the sugar in the fruit and leaves alcohol and carbon dioxide behind, and that is the whole of it — nothing is distilled. The strength is capped by how ripe the grapes were, so an everyday table wine lands between 11% and 15%, roughly a third of what a spirit carries. That one number settles where wine belongs behind a bar. Pour 60 ml of gin and you have the frame of a drink; pour 60 ml of wine and you have dilution with a flavour attached. In a recipe, wine lengthens or seasons. It almost never holds the centre.

The colour is in the skins

Press almost any grape, dark-skinned ones included, and the juice runs clear. Colour is steeped rather than squeezed: ferment the juice together with the skins and their pigment and tannin travel with it, which gives red wine; press the juice off the skins first and you get white. Rosé takes the middle road — dark grapes sit on their skins for a few hours, then the juice is pressed away, so the pink arrives without the weight or the grip. This section gives rosé no page of its own because its use in a glass is simple enough to say here: treat it as something with the acidity of a white and the red fruit of a light red.

Four words that read a label

Dry and sweet describe residual sugar, the grape sugar the yeast did not finish, counted in grams per litre; on a label dry is not an adjective but a threshold someone has to meet. Acidity is the sharpness that makes your mouth water, and it decides whether a wine can hold its shape against sugar and liqueur. Tannin is the set of polyphenols that comes out of skins, seeds and stems. It binds the proteins in your saliva and makes them drop out, and as the lubrication goes your mouth dries, tightens and feels faintly coated. Whites have almost none, reds anything from a trace to a great deal. Body is the weight a wine has in the mouth — alcohol, extract, tannin and acidity together — which is neither the loudness of its flavour nor its sweetness. The three style pages use these four words and do not stop to redefine them.

Sweet wines and fortified wines

One family of wines deliberately stops short. Grape spirit goes in partway through fermentation, the yeast gives up, the remaining sugar stays in the bottle, and the strength rises to somewhere between 15% and 20%. Port is made that way; vermouth and Lillet start from a fortified wine and then add botanicals and fruit. They are sweeter, often bitter, and they keep to a different clock, so a bar shelves them apart — and so does this section, on vermouth and aperitifs.

Three jobs in this catalogue

The first is bubbles on top: a drink is shaken, strained and then filled with sparkling wine, whose gas and acidity open a short drink out. See sparkling wine and Champagne. The second is a float: the New York Sour carries a band of red wine on the surface of a whiskey sour, so the colour and the grip belong to the first mouthful. See red wine. The third is being most of the drink: a Kir is white wine with a measure of blackcurrant liqueur, and most of its alcohol comes from the 90 ml of wine. See white wine.

Ordering a glass

Wine by the glass comes out of whatever was opened that day, so asking what is open gets you further than naming a grape. Then narrow it with the four words: dry or off-dry, sharp or soft, light or full. If you want bubbles, ask for something brut. And if the wine is going with food, say what is on the table — that helps more than naming a region.

After the bottle is open

Pull the cork and oxidation starts. The aroma dulls first, then a tired sourness arrives. Re-seal the bottle, stand it upright in the fridge, and a red or a white is worth drinking for roughly three to five days. Cold is the cheapest way to buy time and it works for red as well; just let the glass warm up before you drink it. Sparkling wine is the exception — even under a proper stopper the gas lasts one to three days, so an opened bottle is a same-day bottle.

Further reading: red wine, white wine, sparkling wine and Champagne, vermouth and aperitifs.