The styles of wine

Wine lists are organised badly almost everywhere - by colour, then by country, then by price. A more useful map sorts by what was done to the wine, because that’s what determines how it will behave in your glass and at your table.

Juice pressed off the skins immediately and fermented clean. Because the skins leave straight away, there’s no colour and effectively no tannins, so the wine stands on acid and aroma alone. The range runs from feather light and plain through to broad, oaky and honeyed - Pinot Grigio to white Burgundy is a wider gap than most reds manage.

Fermented with the skins in the tank, which is where colour, tannin and much of the flavour come from. The length of that contact - the maceration - is the main dial. A few days gives something pale and soft; three weeks gives something dark and gripping.

Red grapes with the skins pulled out early, usually within hours. The good stuff is made purposefully, picked early for acidity, and is one of the most food flexible wines there is. Almost none of it is made by mixing red and white, which is banned in most of Europe - the notable exception being Champagne, where it’s standard practice.

A second fermentation sealed in, so the carbon dioxide dissolves instead of escaping. Do it inside the bottle and you get the traditional method (méthode traditionnelle): fine persistent bubbles and a bready, yeasty complexity from the time spent on the dead yeast cells. Champagne is made this way. Do it in a pressurised tank and you get the tank method: cheaper, faster, and better at preserving fresh fruit aromatics. This is prosecco. Neither is a mistake.

Grape spirit added, taking the wine to 15-22%. The timing of the addition is the whole trick. Add it partway through fermentation and you kill the yeast while sugar remains, leaving a sweet wine - that’s Port. Add it after fermentation finishes and the wine stays dry - that’s Fino Sherry.

Unfortified wines with sugar still left in them. The trick is always the same one: concentrate the sugar in the grape so far that the yeast hits its alcohol ceiling and dies before it has eaten all of it, and what it leaves behind is sweetness. There are three ways to do the concentrating. Noble rot is a fungus that shrivels the grapes on the vine and draws the water out of them (Sauternes, Tokaji). Freezing uses cold, the grapes pressed while still frozen so the water stays behind as ice (Eiswein). Drying does it slowly, the bunches laid out on mats or hung up for months (Vin Santo, Recioto della Valpolicella).