Overview

So, wine hey... isn't it great! But there's so much of it, right? Different colours, countries, regions, varieties, styles, producers... the list goes on. We're going to break it down for you, into little tasty morsels, for you to pick at when you want, like a little grazing plate... but of wine info. So what are the main wine styles you ask?

Fizzy wine. Whether it be fancy vintage Champagne or your everyday favourite prosecco, there's lot to explore in this little niche. Some of the mainstays include Champagne, Prosecco, Cava, Australian Sparkling and Moscato. They're bubbly wines, made in a multitude of ways; from long ageing to simply pumped full of gas, and each one is different

So much to cover here, but essentially white wines are made from white grapes and don't have any skin contact. What's that? We'll cover it a little later, but it's good to know that colour in wine comes from the pigment in the grape skin, and so if the juice and and grape skins can't get cozy (skin contact), you'll have a relatively colourless wine. Like the majority of your favourite whites. The main white grapes you're going to see are Chardonnay, Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Gris. There's a bunch more, but these are the 'Big 4'. These wines are best drunk straight from the fridge, although in some rarer cases they taste a bit better after warming up for a few minutes

All right, let's talk a little more about that skin contact thing we were on about before. Rosés are made from red wine grapes but with only a teeny tiny little bit of skin contact. Rarely, you can find a rosé that is a blend of red and white wine together (like you're at a house party and getting creative), but the first method is more common. The red grape skins hang out with the juice for just a few hours, imparting that lovely pale blush colour we all know and love.

Ok, this is the last time we'll mention skin contact... for now at least. So if rosé is made from red grapes with a small amount of skin contact, then orange wines can be considered the inverse of that - they're wines made from white grapes with a lot of skin contact! Even white grapes have some colour pigment in them, it just takes a bit longer to draw it out of them. The resultant wines are orange/amber in colour, very aromatic, and quite textural.

Red wines are made from red grapes. So far, so good. These are some of the big hitters in the wine world, names you're more than likely be familiar with, or at least heard in passing. We're talking Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon (Cab Sav), Pinot Noir and Grenache. Of course, there's plenty more, but we'll get to those down the track. These are wines of power, best drunk at room temperature (unless you live in Antarctica or the Sahara) or a touch cooler.

All the wines we've mentioned previously are generally made as dry wines. By dry we mean the opposite of sweet, so without sugar. There are the occasional sweeter red, but they are few and far between. Sweet wines are exactly that, wines that are deliberately made with sugar in them. Not that it's added, but in fact it's the natural grape sugars that haven't been fermented (ie transformed into alcohol). That's why some sweeter wines are a little lower in alcohol. We're talking dessert wines, Moscato, but also fortified wines like port, tokay etc. These latter styles have extra alcohol added to them, that stops the fermentation midway, and as previously, leaves some sugar in the wine.