By Eric Speeves

This will be the thirst of many articles about drinking. In fact I think I’m going to give up the boring, dusty subject of the English language and from now on opine about the vine, exhalt the malt and parley about the barley. I wanted to turn up the heat on the wheat too but desperation is an unattractive trait in a writer.

Recently I’ve been taking more than a passing interest in wine; I even found out that people who take wine seriously enough to become experts are called eonologists, rather than winos.

It is believed that vines were first cultivated and wine first produced in Georgia and Iran at around about 6,000 BC (in Portugal they still in fact grow vines on roundabouts and traffic islands), although the first records of vine intervention were provided by the Egyptians around 3,000 BC. Before that they were presumably having far too good a time to be able to write legibly.

The Greeks gave wine a God, Dionysus, and the Romans undervined their empire by establish vineyards all over Europe and developing the manufacture of barrels. It was only a matter of time therefore before the barbarians would be at the gates while the leaders of Rome revelled and could barely stand erect and hold on to their swords.

In medieval Europe the Christian church promoted the use of wine in religious rituals and prohibited the use of beer in countries like Germany, considering it to be barbaric in comparison (I mean beer, not Germany, which is actually quite a nice place, after a beer or two).

Most vine cultivation takes place between latitudes 30 and 50, although countries like Sweden have been known to cheat.

When you hang around with wine connosieurs, then after a while you start picking up the jargon. I was 52 years old and had sunk a glass or two before I first heard the word ‘varietal’. At first I thought they were mispronouncing ‘variety’, but, as is often the case when I nod my head and pretend to understand people who know what they’re talking about, this was not the case.

A ‘varietal’ is (I think) a wine produced with a minimum of 75-80% of a single variety of grape, unlike a ‘blended’ wine, which is made with a greater variety of grape types.

Varieties of grape include Merlot, Chardonnay, Sauvignon and the one made famous in the film ‘Sideways’, Pinot Noir.

‘Phylloxera’ is another word well known to all wine lovers, but not especially loved. It is an insect that attacks vines and in the past caused serious problems to growers until they started grafting from North American vines, which are resistant. Wine growers talk about phylloxera the way ordinary people talk about the flu, unless it is a commercial rival who’s afflicted.

Another key word to know is ‘terroir’, which is the fingerprint of a wine, and is the data about which slope it was grown on, the altitude, kind of soil, climate, and anything else that distinguishes one grape’s life from another’s.

When wines are produced for the mass market, then subtle differences get the McDonalds treatment and homogeneity is achieved through the use of processes such as micro-oxygenation, tannin filtration, cross-flow filtration, thin film evaporation, and spinning cone. This is the point where we all nod our heads sagely and mutter “of course” in the hope that searching questions will not be asked later on.

I always thought that a ‘table wine’ was one better downed near a table, or some other large piece of furniture that could break your fall, but apparently they are wines that have less than 14% alcohol.

‘Sparkling’ wines are those which contain carbon dioxide, which sounds a lot less attractive than ‘sparkling’, and also less inviting than ‘fizzy’ a word most champagne drinkers do not appreciate all that much seeing as how it equates them with ranks of unwashed children sitting in rainy pub car parks sucking on twin straws.

Most serious wine drinkers will see off the riff raff with a simple trick question. They will ask you if you like rosé wine, and then turn and speak to someone else if you confess to this sin.

A wine’s colour has nothing to do with the colour of the skin, but with the presence of the skin during fermentation. Grapes that do have colour in their juice are called ‘teinturier’, and Alicante has an example of these in its ‘bouchet’ variety.

‘Maceration’ is the name of the process by which red wines achieve their colour by being left in contact with the grape skin during fermentation. White wine can be made from green or black grapes, but the skin must be removed during fermentation. A white wine that seems a little pink because it has been made from a very dark grape may be called ‘blush’.

A vintage wine is one whose grapes were all harvested in the same year, or at least 95% of them if it also has a ‘name of origin’, or at least 85% without a name. In English we have to use the French word ‘appellation’, as we don’t have our own one. In Spain they refer to the “denominación de origén”, the best known of which is Rioja; although if you are planning on taking this seriously, you must always bray loudly that you consider Rioja to be grossly over-rated.

Wines are made up of chemical compounds which are similar or identical to those in fruits, vegetables, and spices. That’s why you’ll often hear experts mumbling about “ah yes, a slight touch of leek, and…and....isn’t that just a trace of rhubarb in the bottom left hand corner?”

‘Esters’ and ‘terpenes’ are also key words for wine lovers, as they are some of the organic molecules present in wine that cause variations in taste.

Yes, when you enter the winning world of wining you discover that, like most dark places stored away from sunlight, there is a world of words, and that if you want to be allowed in, you have to learn to speak the language.