Become a wine expert: 40 questions you never dare to ask

Identify grapevine threats, including powdery mildew and cryptogamic diseases, and pests like phylloxera and leafhoppers, with prevention through copper sulfate, lime, and early spring detection.

Explore terroir by examining soil, topography, and climate to understand how earth, minerals, drainage, sun exposure, and ripening shape a wine's sense of place.

Discover how a good vintage depends on harvest rules in France and the USA, the grape growth cycle, and favorable weather, location, and the season.

Balance the grape must by adjusting sugar, water, and concentration to guide fermentation and acidity early, using methods like reverse osmosis, evaporation, and cryo extraction.

Learn the red wine making sequence from harvest to bottling, emphasizing grape quality, sorting, crushing, fermentation with cap management, and maturation, topping up, racking, blending, and final bottling.

Aging wine under controlled maturation develops complex aromas, stabilizes color, and moves sediment between barrels or tanks before bottling.

Explore primeur wine by detailing futures-based purchasing for early investment before the vintage release. Learn how early consumption timing shapes decisions, with examples like November releases.

Explain moelleux and liquoreux by describing sugar per liter thresholds, late harvest grapes, and fermentation control to stop fermentation with sulfur, including ice wine notes.

Discover vin jaune, a Jura white wine aged in old 228-liter casks without topping up, forming a yeast film and maturing for six years and three months.

This lecture explains the French AOC, a certification of origin for wines and other products, based on geographic areas and traditional methods.

Question the reliability of wine classifications, as rankings may misalign with quality and price, while the 1855 classification and the 1955 framework and its ten-year reviews emphasize winemakers' reputation.

Explore how wine ages from making to decline, shaped by geography and aging potential. Track color changes and the evolution of primary, secondary, and tertiary aromas, plus tannin evolution.

Learn how to decide when to drink or cellar wine by evaluating aging potential, acidity, tannins, and winemaking style, and how to track evolution by tasting bottles over time.

Discover how to build a home wine cellar with steady temperatures (around 12 C), 70–80% humidity, a dark, low-vibration space, and bottles stored on their side to keep corks moist.

Learn what corked wine is, with damp cardboard smell and taste, caused by TCA taint from cork fungi contacting chlorides in bleach and winery sterilization products; detection varies by sensitivity.