You will often hear French people talking about some wines being referred to as “vins mousseux”. It is a catch-all term for all sparkling wines, regardless of production method. This includes sparkling wines made through the Ancestral method, the traditional method (“méthode champenoise”) and tank method sparklings…
Since the word “Clos” in French means “enclosure,” any vineyard referred to as a Clos should be enclosed, by a wall in most cases. However, it is also used elsewhere. Burgundy is probably where this term is most prevalent. For their single-vineyard wines, some producers of the Priorat appellation located in Spain have Read more…
The French phrase “sur souches” literally translates to “on the stumps” or, in the case of buying a future crop of wine, “on the vine.” The Bordeaux trade has occasionally purchased futures in a crop before it was even harvested during periods of especially strong sales.
Up until a specific time of the year, typically set by local habits, the “right of banvin” allowed the lord to sell his own wine before that of his vassals (the time during which the sale of wines other than those belonging to the lord were banned varied greatly from Read more…
Grapes that have been dried, or partially dried, before fermentation to raise the sugar level are referred to as “flétri” in French. It is most regularly used in France, Switzerland, and sometimes in the Valle d’Aosta.
“Vin de queue” is a French expression that can be translated as “tail wine”. It comes from the last harvest of Sauternes grapes. The harvest is done by successive selections called “tries successives” (successive passages spread over time), harvesting each time only grapes affected by botrytis (noble rot). During the Read more…
The “Ban des Vendanges” is a French expression which used to designate the proclamation which warned the winegrowers of the opening of the harvest. Not only did it warn them, but it even forced them not to harvest until then. This constraint was aimed at obtaining quality wines, by requiring Read more…
It is a French expression which formerly designated, in the Sauternes region, the richest wines obtained by the first selection, especially qualitative, of the harvest. This scanty first sort was composed almost exclusively of “noble rot” affected grains (Botrytis Cinirea), which reached an exceptionally high sugar content of up to Read more…
A “Vin du Midi” is a French expression. It is a very tricky expression because if you translate it literally it would mean “Lunch Wine”; however, most of the time, French people use this expression in a totally different sense than the literal one. Geographically, “Le Midi” encompasses the whole Read more…
The term “Vieilles Vignes” is French and literally means “Old Vines”. Therefore, you will most often find this term on the front label of some French wines made from old vines. However, there is no real legal definition of that term, which implies that from producer to producer, the threshold Read more…