40+ Wine Descriptions and What They Really Mean

Why Wine Descriptions?

How do you buy wine when you don’t know what it tastes like? A lot of folks rely on reading wine descriptions to get an idea of what a wine will taste like. Wine writing is a business, and its job is to SELL wine, not to be honest or accurate. Below is a list of common wine descriptions and what they actually mean.

Wine Descriptions Glossary

ACIDITY

Wines with high acidity taste tart and zesty. Red wines have more tart fruit characteristics (versus “sweet fruit”). White wines are often described with characteristics similar to lemon or lime juice.

ANGULAR

An angular wine is like putting a triangle in your mouth – it hits you in specific places with high impact and not elsewhere. It’s like getting punched in the arm in the same place over and over again. An angular wine also has high acidity.

AROMATIC

A wine that has a complex and distinctive aroma that’s intense enough to be noticed before even drinking it. Aromatic wines often have strong floral or fruity scents.

AUSTERE

It usually means the wine has very high acidity and if it’s a red wine, high levels of grippy tannins. An austere wine is not fruit-forward nor opulent.

BALANCED

Balance is the perfect mix of its elements, such as acidity, sweetness, tannins, and alcohol. Balanced wines feel smooth and well-integrated on the palate.

BARNYARD

This term describes a wine with earthy, rustic aromas that may remind one of a farm or stable. These scents, often associated with natural fermentation processes, can include hay, straw, wet soil, and even a subtle hint of manure.

BIG

Big describes a wine with massive flavor in your mouth that takes up all sections of your mouth and tongue. A big wine is not necessarily a fruit-forward wine, and it can also mean it has high levels of tannins and/or high levels of alcohol.

BOLD

Bold means that the wine has a full body with strong, intense flavors. Bold wines often have high alcohol content and rich, concentrated fruit flavors.

BRIGHT

Bright wines are higher in acidity and make your mouth water.

BUTTERY

A wine with buttery characteristics is generally rich and has lower acidity. A buttery wine often has a cream-like texture that hits the middle of your tongue, almost like oil (or butter), and has a smooth finish. This often comes from Malolactic Fermentation.

CASSIS

The least fruit-like of all dark fruits. When writers mention cassis, they are often thinking of the tannic character of actual black currants. Homework assignment: try a black currant and report back.

CHARCOAL

A wine that is described as tasting like charcoal tastes gritty, it’s usually dry (with higher tannins) and has this rustic flavor. Charcoal is often associated with a similar characteristic: pencil lead (but less refined).

CHEWY TANNINS

When you take a sip of wine with chewy tannins, it dries out the interior of your mouth so that you “chew” or clean the tannins out of the insides of your mouth.

CIGAR BOX

Cigar box flavors hint towards sweetness and cedar wood with an abundance of smoke. This is a super positive and desirable characteristic that wine writers love to use when they find a wine they wish they could just slowly sip on a leather chair.

CLEAN

Can a wine even be dirty? Well, clean means that it tastes crisp and refreshing with no off-flavors. Clean wines are straightforward and pure in flavor, often making them easy to drink.

COMPLEX

A complex wine simply means that when you taste it, the flavor changes from the moment you taste it to the moment you swallow. As much as I love complex wines, using the word “complex” to describe a wine is a cop-out unless you go on to describe how it’s complex.

CREAMY

Creamy is a popular description for white and sparkling wines that have undergone Malolactic Fermentation. In Champagne, creamy is a favored characteristic that is associated with famous bottles of bubbly…such as Krug. Look for creamy in Chardonnay if you like buttery flavors.

CRISP

Crisp with wine is more often used to describe a white wine with high levels of acidity and generally unoaked. A crisp wine goes really well with a porch swing on a hot day.

DENSE

When a wine writer pares down their lengthy description of flavors and characteristics of a wine into one word, they use dense. Dense is favored for use in bold red wines with high levels of tannin such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Côtes du Rhône, and Brunello di Montalcino.

EARTHY

Earthy is often used to describe savory or herbaceous wines that are the anti-thesis of fruit-forward wines. While these terms don’t really do this wine profile justice, they help describe dominant flavors of the wine in the not sweet fruit category.

ELEGANT

When a wine writer says elegant, they mean that the wine is NOT big, NOT fruity, NOT opulent and NOT bold. Instead, it refers to a wine that exhibits finesse, balance, and sophistication but is typically lighter in body, with higher acidity, and sometimes has more ‘green’ characteristics.

FAT

Wide, big, massive, opulent: These are all similar synonyms of fat. Fat is the least desirable of all of them because it’s flabby. A fat wine comes in and takes up all the room in your mouth and hangs in awkward places.

FLABBY

Flabby means the wine has no acidity. It’s a negative connotation, so don’t say it to a winemaker!

FLAMBOYANT

A flamboyant wine is trying to get your attention with an abundance of fruit. The writer picks up on this and calls it out. No joke.

FLESHY

Imagine the iron-laden sensation of having a piece of raw steak in your mouth that is fleshy.

FOOD FRIENDLY

This generally refers to a wine that has very high levels of acidity, or tannin, or both. Food will help soften one or both of these characteristics meaning and normally enhance the dining experience.

GRIP or GRIPPY TANNINS

With each subsequent sip, your mouth dries, like what happens in the Minerality Tastes Like Rocks? video. Wine with grip is hard to drink, better to sip.

HINT OF…

Hint of = this-wine-definitely-has-this-character-especially-on-the-finish. Expect things like oak, herbs, fruits, soil, or gym socks in the flavor when there is a hint of it in the description.

INTELLECTUALLY SATISFYING

This is a rare but special occurring term used by one of the most famous wine critics, Robert Parker. Robert Parker is sure that if you are not satisfied with this wine on a hedonistic and intellectual level, then you don’t deserve to drink it. This is probably true because these words are reserved for the wines we can’t afford anyway…*sad face*.

JAMMY

Sommeliers and wine experts cringe when they hear this term while the rest of us delight. Jam is delicious and part of the PB&J experience. In wine, jammy indicates a wine with a cooked berry sweetness that is syrupy and often describes American wines like Zinfandel, Grenache, Cabernet Franc, and Australian Shiraz…don’t be a hater.

JUICY

Juicy like the wine was grape juice just a moment ago.

LASER-LIKE

Another one of Robert Parker’s idioms that we can’t help mentioning. Pew! Pew! It often refers to wines with very high, sharp levels of acidity.

LIVELY

Lively wines have bright, high acidity and a sense of energy in the mouth. They’re refreshing and invigorating, making them great for warm weather.

LEES

Lees is a winemaking term describing the dead bits of yeast particles that generally sink to the bottom of a wine. Winemakers stir lees to give a wine a thicker, creamier texture.

MINERALLY

Imagine the smell of fresh wet concrete; now imagine that flavor in your mouth. If you don’t have time to lick concrete, don’t worry — we did.

OAKED

Oh, oak! It is the ultimate non-grape influence on the flavors in wine. In white wine, it adds spice, vanilla, and sometimes coconut. In red wine, it adds flavors often referred to as baking spices, vanilla, and sometimes dill. There are several different countries that make oak wine barrels and wine geeks freak out over who makes the best (American v. France). We don’t vote.

OPULENT

This word is a baseline word for a style of wine that is rich, smooth, and bold.

PEPPERY

This isn’t an episode of Hot Ones, but a peppery wine does have some spice flavors similar to black or white pepper. Peppery wines often have a sharp, pungent character that can be quite distinctive.

REFINED

Refined is a subset of elegant wines. This term often describes tannins in a wine. These wines have the “less is more” ideology about them.

ROBUST

Similar to bold, robust wine is intense, with strong, assertive flavors. Robust wines can be hearty, often making them suitable for pairing with rich, flavorful foods.

SILKY

Silky is the red wine equivalent word to creamy white wines. It generally refers to silky tannins, or smooth tannins, rather than grippy ones.

STEELY

A steely wine has higher acidity and more sharp edges.

STRUCTURED

A structured wine has high tannin and acid and can be tough to drink if the wine hasn’t been aged. People say “structured” because they think that giving the wine a few years will soften it up and make it yummy. Structured wines often work well with food.

TIGHT

This wine is not ready to drink. When you taste a tight wine, it usually has very high tannins, hard-to-identify fruit characteristics, and is hard-to-drink. This wine could benefit from being decanted (see How to Decant Wine).

TOASTY

Toasty is most commonly a reference to a wine that’s oak-aged in medium plus toasted oak. It doesn’t actually taste like toast (sorry to disappoint), it’s more like slightly burnt caramel on the finish.

UNCTUOUS

When a wine is unctuous, it is oily, full bodied, and often high in alcohol.

UNOAKED

An unoaked wine doesn’t have vanilla, coconut, or baking spices in it. An unoaked white wine is more zesty with lemony flavors (see minerally), while an unoaked red wine tends to be more fruit forward.

VELVETY

Lush, smooth, and silky are all synonyms for a velvety wine. This often refers to the tannins and how smooth they are. To imagine velvety, visualize watching perfectly smooth chocolate pouring into a mold.