French Wine for Dummies

A step-by-step guide to understanding French wine.

What I did for summer smears classes is put together a little three-page document are you telling me you can sum up the entire history of French one and three pages hang on it’s not just the great that they’re interested in it’s the whole concept of tail wild terroir

Yeah why terroir tell wild tip tell wild the tail while meaning the place where something is grown so where that where that play where that where that wine is made you have a combination of fat not just enough to know the major regions once you find a region that you like

Within that region there are sub regions all these sub regions and so for all the sub sub categories did you say there were sub regions of the sub regions right so if I open a Bordeaux wine that hasn’t been aged very long it’s still a young Bordeaux wine it’ll have a lot of

Tannin in it tannin is the is the to sum it up in one sentence is a chemical that comes off the skins and the seeds and the stems of the other great when you taste that it tends to make your mouth pucker up yeah that’s right

And that is why doctors say that red wine is like medication for you if you you know that your your council even in the United States now the the agriculture you know yeah the Department of Agriculture food pyramid or whatever that thing is called nutrition pyramid suggests that you

Drink a glass of red wine every day what about two or three no no no no four or five there’s a whole bunch of other wines called Southwest wines and we look on that net that’s a very old bunch of wines in fact the first wines in France

Were probably made in that area soon West those ourself that means Southwest in French that’s deep it gets deeper the more you dig and those wines are haven’t really been discovered yet they’re not very well-known in the United States you get some very good buys in southwest wines because their marketability isn’t

Very high okay wine is grown everywhere table wines are just wines that are outside of the a pedestrian Kanto area and you know haven’t been given any particular sophisticated wine growing expertise or emphasis and so it’s just uh it’s table wines are probably 85% of all the wine

In France have you ever drank a table line on a sofa a good year means lots of things but it generally means that the climate was gracious 2002 was a good year wasn’t it 2002 was a bad year I graduated high school that year it was a catastrophic

Year even in bad years good wine producers can be good wines so there are a lot of parameters you know if you get a Bordeaux wine that is heavy and tannins it means that the wine first of all is probably good for keeping 20-30 years it also means that you don’t want

To open it too soon you’re usually neither wait five six seven sometimes even ten years before you open a really canon wine from Bordeaux like that’s going to happen this one which is a which is a sent a medium and go include 2001 which is a really excellent year this one you can

Probably keep 20 years I think there are something like 6000 different wines produced in France named if you pour some wine in a glass one of the first things you want to do is keep swirling it around a little bit that will start releasing the the odors and

The specificity of that wine so you can begin to start judging it then you you tip it way back as far as you can like that that’s why this is a tasting glass because you can get a lot of a lot of leverage on it like this you stick your

Nose in it but what you’ve got is the smell is evaporating off the top of the of the alcohol right and you take that in a good wine taster gets maybe 50% of the taste and the quality of the wine just by smelling it you sure anyway no

But that is a it’s a miraculous thing to watch somebody and with a red wine you look at it and around the edges the general color of the wine but particularly around the edges of the wine you can tell how old the wine is then the next thing they do they take it

Sip it move it around their their mouth quite a bit and the last thing they do after they switched it around and contemplated a bit and sort of sensed about what the composition of the wine is you swallow it and then you test to see how long you have that lingering

Sensation in the back of your throat if there’s glue in the wine it’s a good sign if it’s a good wine you usually see what are called tears mmm yeah streaming down the side of the wine the tears in and of themselves don’t necessarily mean too much it generally it’s generally

Related to the alcohol content of the one really like wine and you want to start playing around with the subtleties of wine but then you start getting interested in laying wine down and keeping it for several years you also need some place to put wine simply because wine doesn’t tolerate high heat

Or too much sunshine you sure my son and he will probably that would be the ideal temperature for a cava cava is a wine cellar the ideal temperature for a cava is between 12 and 14 degrees centigrade you well Fahrenheit would be it’s in the 50s anyway late and high 50s probably okay

And and if it’s a good wine refrigerator it’ll give you different temperatures at different levels because of course if you’re storing a wine to keep it over the long-term that’s one thing if it’s you’re just setting up a wine to taste it that something else makes sense

Yeah probably not as a cheap woman