A wine is balanced when its structural components, acidity, tannin, alcohol, and sweetness, are in proportion. None of them is dominating the others. This is not a subjective preference: a wine with harsh, grippy tannins and low fruit is unbalanced in the same way a sauce is oversalted. The components are genuinely out of ratio.

Balance isn't simply a matter of personal preference. It describes how the wine's components work together, although what constitutes balance depends partly on the style. A Mosel Riesling with 7.5% alcohol and notable sweetness is balanced within its style. A 15% Shiraz with the same sweetness would not be. The frame of reference matters.

Body describes the weight and texture of a wine in the mouth. A light-bodied wine feels relatively delicate and easy on the palate; a full-bodied wine feels richer, broader and more substantial. The familiar comparison is milk: skimmed milk at one end, full-fat milk at the other. It isn't a perfect analogy, but it gives people a useful starting point.

Alcohol plays an important part, but it isn't the only factor. Residual sugar, glycerol, and other components all contribute to the way a wine feels. A high alcohol level can add weight and warmth, but it doesn't automatically make a wine full-bodied. Equally, a wine with modest alcohol can still have considerable weight and texture.

Body is a useful term when recommending wine with food. A delicate fish dish may be overwhelmed by a particularly full-bodied red, while a substantial stew can make a light-bodied wine seem rather lost. Matching the weight of the wine to the weight of the food is a sensible place to start.

A complex wine presents multiple, distinct layers of aroma and flavour: primary fruit, secondary fermentation characteristics, and tertiary notes developed through ageing. Complexity is not about volume or intensity, it is about variety and depth across those layers.

A simple wine gives you one clear thing. A complex wine gives you several things sequentially, or things that shift as the wine sits in the glass and warms. Worth using carefully: "complex" should mean something has happened to this wine (time in oak, extended ageing, unusual terroir) rather than simply being a compliment for any wine you like.

A corked wine is one that has been contaminated by TCA (2,4,6-trichloroanisole), a compound formed when chlorine-based chemicals interact with fungi present in natural cork. The smell is distinctive: wet cardboard, damp newspaper, a musty basement. The wine's fruit flavours are suppressed, leaving it flat and lifeless.

This is the most important fault term to know with precision. TCA can affect roughly 1 to 3% of wine sealed with natural cork. When a guest sends back a bottle describing it as "musty" or "flat," verify the TCA smell before confirming the fault. Importantly: a wine can be corked even if the physical cork looks fine, and a wine can also be "corked" if it is sealed with a screwcap, because TCA contamination doesn't always originate in the cork.

Crisp means high acidity, specifically in white wines, with the implication that the acid is clean and refreshing rather than harsh or sour. It is roughly equivalent to saying a wine has the acidity of a granny smith apple rather than a lemon. The term is commonly used for Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Grigio, Chablis, and unoaked whites generally.

This is a useful shorthand for guests who want to know whether a white will feel refreshing or rich. Pair it with context: "crisp with pronounced citrus" points somewhere specific. "Crisp" alone is slightly thin.

Fine wine is one of those expressions that means slightly different things depending on who's using it. In the broadest sense, it describes wines regarded as being of particularly high quality, through their origin, producer, balance, complexity, character and capacity to develop with age.

In the trade, the term is also closely associated with the investment and secondary markets. Here, scarcity, provenance, reputation, demand and ageing potential become important considerations. These are the wines that tend to feature in auctions and specialist merchants' cellars.

The distinction matters. A relatively modestly priced wine from an excellent producer in an overlooked region can be a fine wine without having an established resale market. Conversely, a high price or famous name doesn't automatically make a bottle exceptional. Quality and investment potential are related, but they aren't the same thing.

Fresh describes a wine that feels lively and vibrant, usually because of its acidity and the clarity of its fruit flavours. It might suggest freshly cut citrus, crunchy green apple or just-picked red berries, rather than cooked, tired or heavily developed flavours.

Freshness isn't limited to young wines or those without oak. A mature wine can retain freshness, while a young wine can feel heavy or flat. Oak, alcohol and ripeness all influence the overall impression, but none of them rules freshness in or out.

The term overlaps with crisp, although crisp is more commonly used for whites and tends to put the emphasis on acidity. A fresh Beaujolais, for example, is a perfectly natural description. Both words are useful, provided you can explain what is making the wine feel that way.

A long wine has a sustained finish: the flavours persist after you have swallowed. This is measurable, in the sense that you can count the seconds. A finish of 30 to 45 seconds or more is genuinely long. Most everyday wines have a finish of 10 to 15 seconds.

Finish length correlates with wine quality more reliably than most other single descriptors. A wine with a long, balanced finish is doing something structurally interesting. Worth knowing as a tool when helping guests understand why certain bottles cost more: the experience simply lasts longer.

Old vines are exactly what the name suggests: grapevines that have been growing for a long time. The difficulty is deciding how old they need to be to qualify as "old". For a long time, there was no internationally agreed definition, and the term could mean 25 years to one producer and 50 to another.

In 2024, the International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV) decided that an old grapevine is one that is at least 35 years old. That provides a useful reference point, although it doesn't mean the words old vines are now a protected or consistently regulated term on every wine label.

Older vines often produce smaller crops, but that doesn't automatically mean better or more concentrated wine. The result depends on the grape variety, the vineyard site, the health of the vines, how they are farmed and the conditions of the vintage. Age is an interesting part of a wine's provenance, not a guarantee of quality.

There are some genuinely remarkable old vineyards. California's Amador County has Zinfandel vines more than a century old, while parts of Australia's Barossa Valley have Shiraz vines that predate phylloxera. When a producer can tell you the age and origin of the vines, it's worth passing that detail on. Just don't assume that an older vine makes a better bottle.

Structure refers to the framework of a wine: the components that give it shape and allow it to age. The main structural elements are acidity, tannin, and alcohol. A wine with good structure has these in balance, with enough presence to support the wine as it develops over time.

The analogy that holds: structure is the skeleton. A wine without it may taste pleasant young but will not age. A wine with too much of it (high tannin, high acidity) will taste harsh now but may resolve into something interesting over 10 or 15 years. Understanding structure is what separates a useful recommendation from a guess when guests ask about ageing.

Vintage is simply the year in which the grapes were harvested. Every wine label with a year on it shows the vintage. The term matters because climate varies year to year, and the quality and character of a vintage reflects the conditions of that specific growing season in that specific region.

Worth knowing: a great vintage in Bordeaux may be a difficult one in Burgundy, because the varieties, microclimates, and harvest timings differ. Vintage charts are useful orientation, not absolutes. When recommending an aged bottle, knowing the vintage and something about that year's conditions is basic professionalism.

Jammy describes fruit flavours that resemble cooked, preserved or very ripe fruit rather than something freshly picked. Think blackberry conserve, stewed plum or strawberry jam rather than fresh berries. It's most often used for red wines with ripe, concentrated fruit, particularly from warmer climates.

The disagreement is largely about whether this is a compliment or a criticism. Some drinkers enjoy the richness and generosity of a jammy wine. Others find that the cooked-fruit character comes at the expense of freshness, acidity and definition. Neither reaction is necessarily wrong. A wine can be deliberately made in a ripe, fruit-forward style without being faulty or badly made.

It's worth being specific. If you mean ripe blackberry and plum, say so. If the fruit feels cooked and the wine lacks freshness, explain that too. Jammy can be useful shorthand, but it doesn't tell the whole story.

Legs, also called tears, are the droplets of wine that run down the inside of the glass after swirling. They are caused by surface tension differences between alcohol and water (the Marangoni effect). Temperature, humidity, glass surface and other wine components also affect their appearance.

Faster, more pronounced legs correlate with higher alcohol and, to some extent, residual sugar content.

The contest: legs are sometimes presented as an indicator of quality. They are not. They indicate alcohol and sugar levels, nothing more. A guest who watches the legs and nods knowingly is not actually learning anything about the wine's quality. Worth correcting the record if the opportunity arises, diplomatically.

Minerality describes sensations in wine that recall stones, chalk, slate, or crushed rock: dry, non-fruit characteristics that some tasters experience as a kind of salinity or steeliness. Chablis on Kimmeridgian limestone, Mosel Riesling on slate, and Sancerre on silex are the most cited examples.

The contest is significant. Research has not established a straightforward causal link between soil mineral content and detectable mineral taste in wine. The geological minerals in soil are not taken up in forms that reach the wine in measurable quantity. What is happening instead may involve reduced winemaking (sulphur compounds), high acidity, or simply tasters describing the same sensation with different vocabulary. It is a real perceptual experience looking for an explanation it may not have yet. Describe the sensation; be careful about attributing it to the terroir.

Natural wine describes wines made with minimal intervention: hand-harvested grapes, wild yeast fermentation, no fining or filtering, and very low or no added sulphites. The underlying intention is wines that express their origin without winemaking intervention masking or correcting the result.

The contest is everywhere. There is no legal definition of natural wine, no certification, and no agreed threshold for what "minimal intervention" means. Some natural wines are extraordinary. Some are technically faulty: volatile acidity, Brettanomyces, refermentation in bottle. The movement's defenders argue that some of what looks like fault is character. Its critics argue that faulty wine is faulty wine regardless of how it was made. Worth having a position on the specific bottles you stock rather than the category as a whole.

Old World broadly means European wine regions with long winemaking traditions: France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Portugal. New World means everywhere else: USA, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina, South Africa. Historically, Old World wines were characterised by restraint, earthiness, and food focus; New World by fruit-forwardness, higher alcohol, and the expression of winemaking technique over terroir.

The contest: the distinction has been blurring for 20 years. Natural wine producers in Burgundy make wine that would be labelled New World in style 30 years ago. Australian producers from cooler regions make wines that read as classically European. The categories still have some use as rough shorthand, but applying them as hard style predictors will regularly lead you astray.

Terroir is the combination of natural and human influences that give a wine its sense of place. It includes the climate, soil, aspect, altitude and geography of a vineyard, as well as local growing traditions and the decisions made by the people working it. The idea is that wine can express something distinctive about where its grapes were grown, rather than simply reflecting the grape variety or the winemaker's approach.

The difficulty is separating the contribution of terroir from everything else. Soil, climate and topography clearly affect how vines grow and grapes ripen, but the relationship between a particular patch of ground and the flavours in the finished wine is rarely straightforward. Grape variety, vintage, vineyard management, harvesting decisions and winemaking all play their part. Two producers working neighbouring plots can make very different wines, while wines from distant regions can sometimes share remarkably similar characteristics.

That doesn't make terroir meaningless. Place matters enormously in wine, and the differences between regions, vineyards and even individual plots can be fascinating. But terroir isn't a magic explanation for every flavour in the glass, nor is it a guarantee of quality. It's more useful to think of it as the collection of factors that shape a wine's identity, rather than a single identifiable taste.

Elegant is usually intended as a compliment. It suggests a wine that is restrained, refined and harmonious rather than powerful or overtly concentrated. The problem is that it means different things to different people. One taster's elegant Burgundy might be another's thin, underwhelming Pinot Noir. Without more detail, the word tells you relatively little about what's actually in the glass.

I'm not suggesting the quality it tries to describe doesn't exist. Restraint, finesse and precision are all perfectly useful ways of describing wine. The trouble is that elegant tends to bundle them together without telling us which qualities are present. If you mean delicate fruit, fine tannins, lively acidity or a restrained use of oak, say so. Your guest will be better informed.

Reserve, or Reserva, or Réserve, implies the wine has been set aside from the standard production, typically because it is of higher quality, older vine selection, or has received additional ageing. In Spain, Reserva and Gran Reserva have legal definitions tied to minimum ageing requirements. In most other countries, including the UK, USA, and much of the New World, "Reserve" has no legal meaning whatsoever.

Any producer can print "Reserve" on any label. Many do. The word is now used to justify a price premium with no obligation to deliver anything specific. When a guest asks about a Reserve bottling, the only honest answer involves looking at the specific producer's practices, not the word on the label.