Wine-Searcher Technical Wine Terms

We have created a list of technical wine terms which appear throughout the content pages on Wine-Searcher, particularly on our comprehensive regions pages. We hope that this will provide you, our users, with a reference point for a basic understanding of the terminology.

These descriptions answer questions such as:

• How does altitude affect wine quality?
• What is carbonic maceration?
• What is 'flor' and what characters does it impart to the wine?
• What is phenolic ripeness and how does it differ from sugar ripeness?

Please note that the terms and phrases presented on the following pages are only those which appear on our content pages, and not an entire list of technical terms used in the world of wine.

Click on a letter range to list all the technical wine terms in that group.