| Type Producer Vintage Price Anatomy of a Wine Label |
| Wine Basics: How to Read a Wine Label Vintage  The year indicated on a wine label is the vintage, or the year the grapes were harvested. If you're familiar with the vintages of a given region, this can be a telling indicator—red Bordeaux wines were mostly light and diluted in 1992, but opulent and harmonious in 1995.
Even if you don't know whether a specific vintage was good or bad, knowing how old a wine is indicates something about its current style: young, fresh and fruity, or older, smoother and more complex. Most whites, and very many reds, are best within three years of the vintage; wines that age well increase in price over time. Beware of old, inexpensive wines. In the United States, a wine label may only list the vintage if 95 percent of the wine comes from grapes harvested that year. If a blend of grapes from 2 years or more is used, the wine is either labeled nonvintage (NV) or there's no mention of date. Champagnes, Ports and Sherrys also are considered nonvintage, as they are made with grapes of different years' harvests. Text from Wine Spectator's Pocket Guide to Wine and www.epicurious.com. Image from www.wine.com. |
Alcohol Content The United States requires that alcohol by volume information be included on wine labels. For table wine, the US requirement is a minimum alcohol level of 7 percent, a maximum of 14 percent. The label variance can be up to 1.5 percent. For example, a wine label stating "Alcohol 12.5% By Volume" can legally range anywhere from 11 to 14 percent. However, wines cannot exceed the upper or lower limit. The alcohol-by-volume range for sherries is 17 to 20 percent, for ports it's 18 to 20 percent; both have a label variance of 1 percent. Text from www.epicurious.com. |
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