Official definition from Jancis Robinson’s The Oxford Companion to Wine:
Phylloxera. This small yellow root-feeding aphid has probably had a more damaging impact on wine production than any other vine pest, or any vine disease. It attacks only grapevines, and kills vines by attacking their roots. For many years after it first invaded Europe there was no known cure.

The effects of phylloxera were first noted in France in 1863…. The phylloxera louse was an unwelcome import from America which devastated European vineyards until appropriate control measures were found. …. Phylloxera invasion had a major social and economic impact, involving national governments and local committees, and requiring international scientific collaboration. For a while the very existence of the French wine industry was threatened. ….

Phylloxera is now widespread around the world, having been found in California (1873), Portugal (1871), Turkey (1871), Austria (1872), Switzerland (1874), Italy (1875), Australia (1877), Spain (1878), Algeria (1885), South Africa (1885), New Zealand (1885), and Greece (1898).

Layman’s terms from Kori:
Phylloxera is one bad bug. It is actually a root louse that attacks the roots of grapevines. It originated in America but has spread around the world, devastating numerous wine regions.

Wine Word of the Week: Phylloxera was originally posted on Wine Peeps. Wine Peeps - Your link to great QPR wines from Washington State and beyond.

Official definition from Jancis Robinson’s The Oxford Companion to Wine:
Faults in wines vary, of course, according to the taste of the consumer. …. To winemakers, however, wine faults are specific departures from an acceptable norm, the least quantifiable of which may be a lack of typicality.

Faults in a wine’s appearance are generally either hazes, clouds, or precipitates in the bottle. ….

Some wines smell so stale and unpleasant that the taster is unwilling even to taste them. ….

Most faults are already obvious to the nose and need only confirmation on the palate (which is why in a restaurant it is, strictly speaking, necessary only to smell a sample of wine offered by the waiter.)

Layman’s terms from Kori:
Most wine faults can be detected by their off-odors. The most common wine fault is cork taint which is generally characterized by a musty, moldy, wet cardboard aroma.

Wine Word of the Week: Faults was originally posted on Wine Peeps. Wine Peeps - Your link to great QPR wines from Washington State and beyond.

Official definition from Jancis Robinson’s The Oxford Companion to Wine:
Bottling is a vital wine-making operation for all wines other than those packaged in containers other than bottles and those few served straight from a cask or tank as bulk wine.

Bottling techniques vary greatly according to the size, resources, technical ability, and modernity of the winery, although since the 1960s it has been customary almost everywhere to blend all casks or vats of a given lot of wine together before bottling, and to bottle it all at once.

Layman’s terms from Kori:
Bottling is the final step in the winemaking process in which wines are transferred from their barrels, casks, or vats to bottles (at least for wines that are to be packaged in bottles). Once bottled, many wines, especially many red wines, are set aside to age in the bottle before they are sold or consumed.

Wine Word of the Week: Bottling was originally posted on Wine Peeps. Wine Peeps - Your link to great QPR wines from Washington State and beyond.

Official definition from Jancis Robinson’s The Oxford Companion to Wine:
Stabilization is a group of wine-processing operations undertaken to ensure that the wine, once bottled, will not form hazes, clouds, or unwanted deposits; become gassy; or undergo rapid deterioration of flavor after bottling. A quick recovery from bottle sickness and subtle changes in flavor that occur with lengthy ageing are considered normal in a stable wine.

Everyday wines are usually more thoroughly stabilized than fine wines since consumers have come to expect them to be crystal clear. ….

Stabilization includes two sorts of operations: one to counter physical and chemical changes and another to counter microbiological changes.

Layman’s terms from Kori:
Stabilization is a technique used primarily in white wine production to make the wine look better. Heat stabilization helps to prevent unsightly haze while cold stabilization precipitates out tartrate crystal deposits.

Wine Word of the Week: Stabilization was originally posted on Wine Peeps. Wine Peeps - Your link to great QPR wines from Washington State and beyond.

Official definition from Jancis Robinson’s The Oxford Companion to Wine:
Clarification is the winemaking operation which removes suspended and insoluble material from grape juice, or new wine, in which these solids are known as lees. …. Clarification can usually be accomplished naturally by simply holding the liquid in a storage tank until the larger particles settle and then siphoning, or racking, the clear upper layer from the compact layer of solids at the bottom of the tank. This takes time, however, especially if the wine is stored in small barrels where full clarification can take a year or two and several rackings.

Most winemakers, therefore, and certainly all concerned with high-volume production, choose to speed the process by intervening with one or more of filtration, centrifugation, flotation, and the much cheaper process of fining, the addition of agents which aid agglomeration and settling of colloids in the must or new wine.

Layman’s terms from Kori:
Clarification is the winemaking process in which undesirable particles (those that cause a wine to be cloudy, etc) are removed by centrifuging, filtering and/or fining.

Wine Word of the Week: Clarification was originally posted on Wine Peeps. Wine Peeps - Your link to great QPR wines from Washington State and beyond.

Official definition from Jancis Robinson’s The Oxford Companion to Wine:
Fermentation, as it applies to wine, is the process of converting sugar to ethanol (ethyl alcohol) and carbon dioxide effected by the anaerobic (oxygen-free) metabolism of yeast. It comes from the Latin word fervere, to boil; any mass containing sugar that has been infused with yeast certainly looks as though it is boiling, as it exudes carbon dioxide bubbles.

Layman’s terms from Kori:
Fermentation is the second step in the winemaking process in which grape sugars are converted to ethanol and carbon dioxide. Fermentation occurs naturally when yeast comes into contact with the sugars in the grape juice that were released during crushing.

Wine Word of the Week: Fermentation was originally posted on Wine Peeps. Wine Peeps - Your link to great QPR wines from Washington State and beyond.

Official definition from Jancis Robinson’s The Oxford Companion to Wine:
Crushing is the wine-making operation of breaking open the grape berry so that the juice is more readily available to the yeast for fermentation. Modern winery equipment that permits sufficiently thorough crushing has effectively speeded up the onset and completion of fermentation. The additional advantages of this are that the rapid accumulation of alcohol discourages any activity on the part of wild yeast and bacteria. …. Crushing was traditionally done by foot, by treading grapes thinly spread on a crushing floor slanted towards a drain and bounded by low walls to prevent the loss of juice. Foot treading is a relatively inefficient method of crushing, however….

Layman’s terms from Kori:
Crushing is the first step in the winemaking process once the grapes picked during harvest have arrived at the winery. Crushing is the step in which the grapes are broken open to make the juice available to the yeast to start fermentation. In the past, crushing was done by trampling the grapes barefoot (remember the classic “I Love Lucy” grape stomping episode). Today, most wineries use a mechanical crusher.

Wine Word of the Week: Crushing was originally posted on Wine Peeps. Wine Peeps - Your link to great QPR wines from Washington State and beyond.

Official definition from Jancis Robinson’s The Oxford Companion to Wine:
Harvest is both the process of picking ripe grapes from the vine and transferring them to the winery (or field pressing station), and its occasionally festive, if frenetic, duration. This transition period in the wine-making cycle from vineyard to cellar is also known as vintage (crush in much of the New World)…. Harvest typically takes place in autumn: September and October in the northern hemisphere and March and April in the southern hemisphere.

Layman’s terms from Kori:
Harvest is a special time of year in the wine industry. Harvest is when the ripe grapes are picked from the vineyard and taken to the winery for crushing.

Wine Word of the Week: Harvest was originally posted on Wine Peeps. Wine Peeps - Your link to great QPR wines from Washington State and beyond.

Official definition from Jancis Robinson’s The Oxford Companion to Wine:
Oaky is a tasting term usually applied to wines too heavily influenced by oak flavor, which smell and taste more of wood than fruit, and may be aggressively tannic and dry.

Layman’s terms from Kori:
Ms. Robinson’s definition is fairly straightforward on this one. Oaky is a tasting term used for wines that have too much oak flavor. Heavy aromas and flavors of wood, smoke, butter, and/or vanilla can indicate that a wine is oaky.

Wine Word of the Week: Oaky was originally posted on Wine Peeps. Wine Peeps - Your link to great QPR wines from Washington State and beyond.

Official definition from Jancis Robinson’s The Oxford Companion to Wine:
Fortified wines are those which have been subject to fortification and therefore include sherry, port, Madeira, vermouth, Malaga, mantilla, Marsala, liqueur Muscat, Liqueur Tokay, and several strictly local specialties. Fortification is the practice of adding spirits, usually grape spirit, to wine to ensure microbiological stability, thereby adding alcoholic strength and precluding any further fermentation.

Layman’s terms from Kori:
Fortified wines have had alcohol added to stop fermentation and increase its alcoholic strength (some to as high as 20 percent). The most common fortified wines are port and sherry.

Wine Word of the Week: Fortified was originally posted on Wine Peeps. Wine Peeps - Your link to great QPR wines from Washington State and beyond.