Red Wine

Wine Guide / The Basics/ Wine style / Red Wine

Red Wine at its core a ferment produced from red grapes. And yet it is so much more than that. To those who love and drink it frequently, red wine is simply liquid art and a life’s pursuit. Winemakers themselves confess that red winemaking is a culture, not an exercise.

Red wine is vinified from a bunch of red grapes where in fruit is crushed and juice and skin stay in contact for days so the juice can extract colour and flavour. At its most imperious, red wine is a mélange of flavours and expression that inspire poetry.

Tastes Like

There are literally infinite styles of red wine. Almost every major red wine grape has be adapted to vineyards across the world to unlock many flavours. Red wines abound with tones of ripe red fruit (plum, cherry, raspberry) and black fruit (blackberry, blackcurrant). As red wine ages beautifully in barrels, it takes on deeper tones like smoke and vanilla and adds dimensions to the wine’s core flavours.

Plums

Cherries

Blackberry

Key Varieties To Taste

Cabernet Sauvignon is the world’s most widely planted red wine grape, lording over the legendary Bordeaux blend in France and making ripe and balanced reds across South Africa, Chile, America and Australia.

Syrah is a Rhone Valley native that makes intense and flavourful wines across the region, boasting some prestigious appellations and has quite the enviable reputation in the new world, especially in Australia where it’s called Shiraz.

Merlot is a Bordeaux native that is part of its cherished blend and is also much loved for its charming expressions as a singular wine in Chile, America and Australia.

Pinot Noir is an elegant yet enigmatic grape that, unlike other French Noble grapes, excels in very few countries around the world like New Zealand, America, Australia and South Africa.

Sangiovese is arguably Italy’s most important grape, native to the top of mind region of Tuscany, yielding styles of the calibre of Brunello Di Montalcino, Chianti and revolutionary Super Tuscans.

Tempranillo is synonymous with Spanish wine and is native to Rioja where it produces powerful and age worthy red wines.