How To Read a Wine Label - Classic Wines TV

One correction - the name on the front of an American bottle of wine is the brand name.. which is not necessarily the producer. The producer's name is always on the back in a line that says Produced & Bottled by. Unless the back is the front. But that's another story.

You bring up an interesting issue, and I’m thrilled to be able to discuss this. Because unfortunately, wine terminology is often far fuzzier than it should be. In terms of the name on the front label, I consciously used “producer” because “brand” didn’t seem to be quite as accurate for what I was trying to convey. Whenever I travel to a wine region, almost without exception, the people involved in the crafting of wines refer to themselves as “producers.” I tend to think of “brands” more in terms of mass-market wines; Yellow Tail, for example, is a brand. Gallo is a brand. But, say, Dutton-Goldfield, a fabulous producer in Sonoma, is, to my mind, certainly not a brand, at least in the same way as those other two. I also tend to think of “brand” as the overarching company that perhaps owns the “producer”---though, occasionally, that brand will in fact be the producer itself. This is a matter of semantics, of course, as well as personal preference, but also one of how words affect consumers’ (and producers’) impressions of what they’re hopefully drinking with dinner every night. Of course, it’s an entirely different matter when the proprietary name of the wine is the only one featured on the front label, but that, too, is a different issue altogether. Also, not all American labels say “produced and bottled by.” Some say “vinted and bottled by.” Frustrating stuff--enough to make us want to drink!

Another health benefit has been attributed to red wine - fighting off the common cold. According to scientists in Spain, drinking wine, especially red, stops people from developing colds. Something in wine seems to have a protective effect because the same was not seen with beer and spirits. The evidence comes from a year long study of 4,000 volunteers. Experts at five universities found that people who drank more than two glasses of red wine a day had 44% fewer colds than teetotallers. Drinking one glass of red wine a day also protected against colds, but to a lesser extent. Read the rest = http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1986514.stm

very interesting. Well done.