Tips - How to Choose a Good Bottle of Wine

Buying a good bottle of wine can be intimidating especially if you are not experienced. Often buyers think that you have to spend a lot of money in order to get a full bodied and smooth tasting bottle of wine. This is simply not the case. While wine preference is personal, there are several ways to find a great bottle of wine for less than fifteen bucks. First, find a wine merchant who carries many different labels of wine. Next you should narrow down your wine varietal such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel, Chardonnay, etc. Once know what kind of wine you are looking for, lastly you have to decided how much do you want to spend. I typically do not want to spend more than fifteen bucks. To some this still may sound like a lot of money but if you are willing to go to fifteen dollars, you will have access to plenty of wines.

Now that we know how much we want to spend and what kind of wine we want to buy, we now can look at the label where we can learn much about this particular bottle of wine. What vineyard or winery made the wine? The name of the winery is the most obvious title on the label. Under that you will see the year or vintage. This is the year the grapes were harvested and made into wine. A young wine will have different characteristics than an older wine. Under the year, you will find the variety of grape used to make the wine. When the name of particular grape is used, no less than seventy-five percent of the wine must be from this grape thus a wine labeled Cabernet Sauvignon must be seventy-five percent Cabernet Sauvignon grapes.

The other twenty-five percent can be from any other varietal. Under the kind of wine is where the grapes come from. This part is the key for picking a good to great bottle of wine. A wine that is labeled Napa Valley or Sonoma County must only use grapes found within these areas. Usually the smaller the area, the better the quality wine. A wine labeled "California" means that grapes can come from anywhere in the state. This to me makes too much of hodgepodge mixture to be of any significant quality. The last point I want to bring up is if the wine label says "Reserve," or "Estate."

A reserve wine is going to the superior wines from that winery. It is make with select grapes and utilizes the "Free Run Juice" which is the juice of the grapes before they are pressed. Reserve wines however do cost more and I typically only drink them on special occasions. Estate wines are neat because the term "estate" means that the wine must be produced entirely on the property. It must be grown, produced and bottle right on the property.

Source: Ezine Articles
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