Styles and Types of Wine

Modern technical advances and understanding have improved wine quality, and renewed interest in older techniques that has resurfaced. This chapter discusses the numerous types and styles of wine. One of them is still table wines, which constitute the largest grouping of wines and requires the most extensive number of subcategories. Grouping is initially divided based on color, reflecting major differences in use, flavor, and production technique. Wines possessing a distinctive varietal aroma generally increase in flavor complexity during the first few years of bottle aging. Cultivar properties set limits on the attributes the wine possesses during the production. Production procedures have often arisen independently over centuries; there is no evolutionary logic by which they should be organized. For simplicity, they have been grouped relative to their use, before, during, or after alcoholic fermentation. Many procedures are designed primarily to adjust for deficits in grape or wine attributes. Three types of styles are determined in this chapter, white, red, and rose wine style. Except for sparkling roses, which are made by blending a small amount of red wine into the base white wine, still roses are usually produced from red grapes given short maceration. This limits anthocyanin uptake, generating a slight pinkish coloration. Frequently, this process involves a gentle crushing of the grapes, followed by contact between the juice and pomace for between 12 and 24 h under cool conditions (to delay the onset of fermentation). The juice is run off and fermented similarly to a white wine.