全面解读葡萄酒上的英文标签
2014-01-19 02:24:01   来源：作文地带   评论：0 点击：

逛酒窖或超市去买葡萄酒时是不是不知道选什么呢，看着那一个个标签不知道是什么意思是件很恼人的事，下面就为大家介绍一下这些标签的意思：

Say you're in the wine store and you want to buy something new. You have nothing to go by outside of the label. Will the label tell you anything you should know? There are a million caveats and exceptions, but here's some general advice:

Vintage. This is actually the first thing we look for ourselves. You don't need to have a vintage chart in your pocket or care whether 2001 or 2002 was a better year in the Sierra Foothills. The vast majority of wines at the store are meant to be drunk right away, so you want to make sure the wine isn't too old, particularly if you're buying it expecting lively, fresh fruitiness. We routinely see five-year-old Pinot Grigio and two-year-old Beaujolais Nouveau at stores, for example, so as soon as we see that kind of age on wines like those, we know we can skip them and move on (and possibly not shop there again).

Alcohol content. Too many wines today have too much alcohol, which leaves them unbalanced. Sure, there are some classic wines with fairly high alcohol levels, but many of today's regular table wines - Merlot, Chardonnay, Shiraz, Zinfandel - have levels at 15% or above. Some of those might be terrific, but if we had nothing else to go on, we'd look for alcohol content at about 14% and below.

Critter labels. In the past few years, there has been a profusion of inexpensive wines with cute animals on the labels. We have tasted these wines and they are generally less attractive than the labels. Of course, some good wines happen to have animals on the labels - consider Stag's Leap or Iron Horse from California, for instance - but, especially when it comes to less-expensive wines, we'd avoid wines where the cute animal seems to be the main point of the wine. A humdinger of a tale about the animal is often a clue that this is a wine to avoid.

Geography. The more specific the better. A wine that says it's from Napa is probably a better bet than a wine that simply says it's from California. It's the same way all over the world. Unfortunately, this will also probably be reflected in the price, so this might not tell you much about value. There are fabled vineyards around the world, plots of land famous for producing high-quality grapes. If you care enough to know a few of these, they might help you make an educated guess about quality.

Estate-bottled. This means the people who made the wine also had a hand in growing the grapes on their own land. We generally find this a good sign.

Reserve. On American wines, this doesn't mean anything, so ignore it. There are various rules around the world concerning words like Reserva, but there's no guarantee it means anything in other parts of the world. Unless you know something about the rules concerning, say, Rioja, where it has genuine significance, don't worry about it.

Old vines or vieilles vignes. Theoretically, older vines produce fewer, but more flavorful, grapes, but the problem is that no one has defined what an 'old vine' is, so anyone can put this on the label. Again, ignore it.