Wine Guide — Basics
9 Styles of Wine
Most of us started by taking or stealing a sip from daddy's glass, or being forced into it at a college party. Whether you liked it or hated it, that's your good/bad journey beginning, and your first exposure to the vast world of wine. Quite quickly you learn there's very few wines that taste the same, and you probably might not like a lot of them, even those that your friends recommend.
Dessert Wines - Pick Your Favorite Dessert
Making dessert style wines is actually quite difficult. It's not just about using the right grape varietals, but winemakers also need the skills to know with is the exact harvest timing & winemaking conditions. It covers everything from the condition of the grapes on the vine, as well as the right timing to stop fermentation of wines, and how to do so in the right fashion for the wine style.
Fortified Wines - Sherry, Port, Madeira & more
Made by adding grape brandy to a wine, fortified wines can often be barrel aged for years, and tend to have a much longer shelf life once opened due to the higher alcohol content
While fortified wines are often treated as a type of dessert wine, it's so vast that it deserves a category on it's own. They can either be dry or sweet, but because of the deep complexity to their profile, as well as the weight of the alcohol & body, it's usually treated as a post dinner drink.
Sustainable Wines - Natural, Organic, Biodynamic & the works
If you consider conventional winemaking as a scientific philosophy of winemaking, then other wine styles like natural or biodynamic winemaking can be interpreted as different philosophies to winemaking. While science always plays a role in fermentation, these other wine philosophies also consider other influences as part of the overall approach to winemaking, starting from the land that the grapes are planted on, to the fermentation & maturation processes.
