Bluff your way into: wine terms

Wine, oh wine. No drink knows how to captivate people so completely while making them feel so uncertain at the same time. But they won’t get the better of you: with the wine terms below, you can easily bluff your friends under the table. Remember them and impress!

Degustation

A difficult word for wine tasting. Use it when you invite your ‘friends’ over to taste wine.

Dépot

The sediment (or lees) at the bottom of the bottle. Found in red wines that were not filtered before bottling and wines that have matured in the bottle for a long time.

Chambérer

When an overly cool (red) wine is brought to room temperature. Don’t take it too literally: room temperature here can easily mean 21 ºC. The French chambre means ‘room’ – in this case, one without central heating.

Millésime

Indicates that the champagne was made from a single vintage, which is unusual, since champagne is often a blend of different years. Champagne from a very good year – and you can explain that beautifully to your fellow diners.

Bouquet

All the aroma and flavour characteristics of a wine, best taken in when you have your nose deep in the glass.

Aroma/parfum/nose

All good alternatives to the everyday word ‘smell’. Act like a wine snob and say something casual after a sip, such as: ‘what a beautiful nose!’

Astringent

A rough, puckering sensation in your mouth, caused by tannins and acids in young red wine. It feels as though you have bitten into an overly sour apple.

Pétillant

French for sparkling, with teeny-tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide. Use it for refreshingly fizzy sparkling wines. Not champagne, whose bubbles are often more powerful and larger.

Floral

Flowers, fruitiness and freshness. The wine smells and tastes like the Keukenhof on a sunny spring day before opening time.

Body

How does the wine’s flavour feel in your mouth: light or full-bodied? In the latter case, the wine has body.

Tannic

A difficult term for astringent, used for powerful red wine that you really should store for a few more years so it can lose its tannins – from the skins, seeds and oak barrels – and become smooth.

Elegant

A term you can use whenever you like, and which sounds just a little better than ‘tasty’. In fact, you are saying that the wine possesses a certain finesse and style.

Botrytis

Latin for ‘noble rot’, a rotting process with its advantages. The Botrytis Cinerea fungus creates tiny holes in the grape skins, causing moisture to evaporate and increasing the concentration of sugars in the grapes. You don’t need to remember all that, only that it applies to (intensely) sweet white wines. Such as the world-famous Chateau d’Yquem. Mumble something about ‘noble rot’ and you’ll rise enormously in everyone’s estimation.

Finish

The flavour that remains in your mouth after swallowing the wine. Does it have a good finish, a long finish? If you taste nothing after just a few seconds, the wine has no finish.

Maderized

Because of too much oxygen, the wine has developed an overly dark colour and overripe flavour (reminiscent of Madeira or cognac). Especially found in white wine that has been stored for too long. Just watch your fellow diner’s mouth fall open when you point out this flaw in the wine and calmly ask the waiter for a new bottle!

Animal

The wine reminds you of Africa’s Big Five or a grizzly bear from Canada that has just woken from hibernation. In short: wild animals with thick (sometimes leathery) skin. You mainly smell this in older red wines that have matured in oak.

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• Are you drinking the wrong wine with your cheese board?
• Supermarket wine: what should you look for?