What appears on the wine label counts. You can learn a lot about a wine before you buy. The trick is to know what’s worth reading. Wine label literacy can go a long way to increasing wine enjoyment and decreasing buyer remorse.

James Nevison & Kenji Hodgson
Co-authors, “Had a Glass” Annual Series

From Had a Glass: Top 100 Wines for 2008 under $20:

Required Reading: Decoding a Wine Label (p. 26 &27)

Wine or Winery Name
Back in the day, the name would be that of a Château or domaine, or possibly it’d be a proprietary name that was used by a winemaking co-operative. While these are still out there, now brand names, animal species, and hip monikers are gracing wine bottles – all in an effort to help you remember what you drank.

Vintage
The year printed on the label is the year that grapes were grown. There are good years and bad years, usually determined by weather conditions. Should you care? in good grape-weather years there’ll be more good wine, but off years don’t necessarily mean bad wine. If the winemakers know what they’re doing, their wines will overcome the less-than-perfect vintages. A vintage also tells you how old the wine is. Oldies aren’t necessarily goodies, but many wines improve with cellar time.

We include the vintages for the wines we review. Where no vintage is listed, the wine is “Non-vintage,” meaning it’s been made from a mix of years.

Alcohol
Generally expressed as “alcohol by volume” (ABV), this tells you how much wine you can taste before the line between “tasting” and “drinking” becomes blurred. Or blurry. As a rough guide, a higher alcohol content (14% is high, anything above 14.5% is really high) suggests a heftier, more intense wine. On the other end of the ABV spectrum, wines with less than 11% will often be off-dry (slightly sweet). High alcohol doesn’t mean a better wine. Regardless of the number, if the wine avoids the grating bitterness of alcohol, then it’s a well-balanced drop.

Appellation
Or, where the grapes come from. Old World wine, say from France, often gives you the appellation instead of the grape variety. You’ll see something like “Bordeaux,” which describes where the grapes originated, but because French laws state only certain grapes are authorized in certain areas, the appellation name also hints at what grapes made the wine.

Grape Variety
You pick up a can of soup and it’s mushroom or tomato. On the wine bottle it’s the grape variety that defines the wine: Shiraz or Merlot or Chardonnay, to mention a few. These are your “single varietal” wines, as opposed to “blended” wines, the likes of Cabernet-Merlot and Semillon-Sauvignon Blanc. Keep in mind, single varietal wines are no better than blends and vice versa. It all comes down to good winemaking creating good-tasting wine. Trust your taste buds.

Here are more details on the wines that James & Kenji featured in the video:

About Had a Glass 2008:

Arm yourself with Had a Glass and never pick the wrong wine again. James & Kenji put their pens where their palates are in this new edition of the bestselling annual series. This time, they’ve picked their top 100 wines of 2008. Featuring the wines worth getting into, this book avoids complicated terminology and pretension to give you the goods on the best 100 wines for your buck. These irreverent, offbeat reviews include handy suggestions for pairing each wine with food and for coordinating wine with occasions.

New for 2008:
• Wine-soaked recipes!
• An even better (and bolder) section on wine enjoyment including wine and food pairing strategies
• More organic wines than ever before.

About James Nevison & Kenji Hodgson:

James & Kenji are HALFAGLASS, an alliance formed out of the desire to make wine more fun and accessible. You can find their reviews and wine musings on their website, www.halfaglass.com, as well as in their weekly “Wine Guys” column in The Province newspaper.