Cool climate syrah smells, tastes, even feels different as a wine than that from warmer vineyard areas. And wine tasters, once they put them side by side (in place or memory), might well prefer one to the other precisely for these differences. Most of these differences are accounted for by how syrah ripens, a function of climate if ever there was one. Photo from Al Elmes on unsplash

How to save the wine in a half-filled bottle from spoiling, open a bottle without a corkscrew, remove the last half of a broken cork, and serve wine at the proper temperature.

If you want to step out and like some wines that are like the standards—such as chardonnay or cabernet sauvignon—I offer some suggestions. You can always go back to same old, same old. 

The destiny of this hefty text is as permanent resident on your wine reference shelf, alongside such indispensables as Robinson’s own editorship of “The Oxford Companion to Wine.”

You may taste many things in a sip of red wine: a panoply of fruit flavors, earth or minerals, spicy wood, even the cleansing astringency of tannin. In a wine made from carménère, a red grape born in France but that has flowered of late in Chile, you also will taste mystery. Illustration of the Carmenère grape variety by Jules Troncy in the work "Ampelography,” 1901

Time was, not so long ago, that the term du jour in wine talk was “minerality.” It’s still regnant in some tasting circles. It describes the scent or taste (or even aftertaste) of some sort of mineral, stone or rock in a wine. Burgundian Chablis, for example, almost always tastes of chalk; red Priorat, of schist; Mosel riesling, of slate.  

Know that never before in the history of wine has more and better wine been made all over the globe. If you want the best wine for the best price, go for grape varieties that you’ve never heard of (often from places that you didn’t know made wine). Here’s a too-short list of white wine values, from the grape’s point of view.  

One of the better ways to learn about wine is to taste it, especially by comparing one wine with another or, even better still, with several other wines. The best place and time to do that is at a wine tasting, an event held to showcase a number of wines. 

It’s a no-brainer that the combination of best value and highest quality in wine now comes from offbeat winemaking regions and their odd grapes. Here’s a too-short look at that combo in red wine, from the grape’s point of view.  

When a chardonnay is “unoaked” or “unwooded,” however, it stands naked in its bottle. Many winemakers choose to fashion such expressions of chardonnay, some by the traditions of their area, others with an eye to letting the grape simply strut its plainspoken stuff. Photo from Manuel Venturini on unsplash.

“Who makes better wine? Europe or America?” (You sometimes hear the question as “Old World versus New World? Whose wine wins?”) I’d rather frame the issue as “What can we learn from each other in order to make better wine ourselves?” 

Chianti has grown up with us and, like some of us perhaps, gotten better with time. Sixty years ago, though popular, it was not always well made. Today’s Chianti is as good an Italian red as can be. Like any good wine, it resembles the place from which it comes, one of the most comely homes for the vine, the Tuscan countryside. 

To bank on a skilled grower and maker of chardonnay, who works in a less well-known region of Burgundy, is to place, to my way of thinking, as safe a bet on white wine as there is. You just need to know whom to seek out and where to look. 

Everything you need to know in order to read a bottle of wine made in the USA.

The only reason to age any wine is to experience its greater value, whether because it is rarer and more dear (good for investors in wine) or because it has changed “for the better”—gained complexity or softened its tannic grip or developed tertiary aromas and flavors. That doesn’t happen on the mere ride home. 

Here's a tour of Austria's three major red wine grapes and the characteristics that define them. 

Each year, the three regions of Sicily, Puglia and Veneto vie for first place as producer of the largest amount of Italian wine. While, in any given year, Veneto may lose that contest to one of its southern kin, it’s no issue to name Italy’s top maker of DOC (or quality-legislated) wine. The winner is always Veneto—producer alone, of Italy’s 20 regions, of one-fifth of all Italian DOC wine. 

While, for millennia, oak functioned to store and carry wine, it’s only in the past 100 years or so that have we cared about what it does to the wine it houses, especially how it both flavors and matures it.

You’re familiar with tannin even if you’re not familiar with red wine. They make over-steeped tea bitter and astringent; they’re what scrunch up your tongue if you chew too long on a Popsicle stick or wooden toothpick.  And they are absolutely crucial to grapes growing up successfully on the vine, and to wine both being made and being appreciated, especially over time. 

Port is the only wine to have been invented by mistake and political intrigue. Photo from Alice Kotlyarenko on unsplash