How to read wine labels
The Wall Street Journal recently posted a great article on how to read wine labels. Some of the items they talk about are pretty standard - vintage, alcohol content, geography - but they also have some unexpected hints. For example, they believe a phone number on the wine label is a very good sign. When they see a number, it’s a sign that the wine is produced by a highly personal winery, and if you call there’s a good chance you may find yourself talking to the winemaker or owner. They don’t like critters on the label (although they admit there are exceptions). They like to see “estate-bottled,” because it’s a sign that the people who bottled the wine also had a hand in growing the grapes.
Mid-South Alcoholic Supply’s bookstore has plenty of books that can teach you even more about wine.
January 26th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
Critters on the label…
I think their opinion (Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher) on that particular aspect is somewhat short sighted. YellowTail has set records with the number of cases sold and is now the most imported wine into the U.S. market, (http://www.duke.edu/web/soc142/team5/compyellow.html). I suppose, however, that is one of the exceptions.
Goose Creek Vineyard (http://www.goosecross.com/) has been in operation since 1985. This vineyard has produced and is producing some exceptional wine. Yet, this must be another exception.
ACNielsen reports that U.S. wine consumers purchase new wine twice as often as the competition when an animal is depicted on the label. ACNielsen gathers their data from point-of-sale purchase systems in supermarkets. According to their analysis in 2005, wines with animal labels or names reached sales volumes greater than $600 million. Danny Brager, vice president of ACNielsen’s alcohol beverage team stated, “…critter brands outsold the competition about two-and-a-half to one.”
Perhaps we should familiarize ourselves with the taxonomic ranks: domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species…so one might avoid a wine faux pas.
It is precisely this type of narrow minded thinking that is wrong with the wine market. Wine enthusiast should encourage the public to try many different types of wine; whether it be a 2005 Chateau Pontet-Canet Pauillac or a 2005 Friday Monkey Shiraz.
Here’s a pretty simple rule to follow when evaluating your wine; drink it if you like it, buy it if you love it and don’t let other so called wine experts tell you what you should or should not like.
But then again, the Pontet-Canet has a picture of a French Chateau. Perhaps we should avoid wines with depictions of buildings. Or is it action verbs…no…wait, it is lettering in the script font, or was it labels with certain words…or should we avoid labels with the color blue? Yes, that must be it. Forget it! I’ll just switch to beer. Now let’s see should I buy American brewed or Belgium. Yikes! I wonder if horse pictures are bad…