Wine: you can learn a lot from reading the label

“What should I look out for on a wine label?” a friend asked the other day. The question came as a bit of a surprise: he likes his wine and is really knowledgable about food, so I’d have assumed he would have been confident about reading a wine label. Yet when I came to think about it, it’s far from straightforward.

First, where a wine comes from, which may be more or less specific: a single vineyard or an entire corner of a continent, as is the case with south-east Australia. The more specific the information, the better (and generally more expensive) the wine. A premier cru chablis such as the sumptuous Samuel Billaud Séchet 2015 (£25 Wine Society; 13% abv), say, is inevitably going to be more complex and rewarding than a petit chablis.

Likewise, the grape variety will be mentioned on some wine labels but not on others. In the case of chianti, rioja and bordeaux, it’s all about the location again, rather than the grape or blend. Knowing the producer may or may not be helpful, too, depending on the state of your wine knowledge, and less so, obviously, if you don’t know the key players in the region (though you can always Google them). More often than not, it’s a brand rather than a man or woman, which at least gives you the reassurance of consistency: Yalumba, whose Organic Viognier 2016 (14.5% abv) is on promotion at Waitrose at the moment at £7.49 (down from the usual £9.99), is a reliable Australian name to remember.

Vintage, too, can be super-helpful. Most wines on the high street will be 2015s and 2016s, though a few new world 2017s are already hitting the shelves (leave them for the time being). So if you like your wines crisp and fresh, beware whites and rosés still on sale from 2013 and 2014.

Alcohol content is another hugely useful indicator of the style of wine inside a bottle, and whether it is going to be light (say 12% or 12.5% abv) or full bodied (14% and over).

Also, is the wine dry or sweet? With their formal classification, the Germans are arguably the best at flagging up that sort of information, but even then, wines such as the delicious, and apparently dry Bibo Runge Trocken Riesling 2015 (£16.75 Oddbins; 12.5% abv) with its citrus and honey flavours, might strike some as sweet.

Tricky, eh? It all goes to show that you shouldn’t take one piece of information in isolation. A label may proclaim that a wine is oak-aged, for instance, but if it’s of an older vintage, the influence may not be that obvious. So read the back of the label, check the website or, even better, ask a real live human being.

matchingfoodandwine.com