Wine Word of the Week: Balance
By Kori ~ July 17th, 2008.
This week’s Wine Word of the Week is balance.
Official definition from Jancis Robinson’s The Oxford Companion to Wine:
Wine tasters say that a wine has balance, or is well balanced, if its alcoholic strength, acidity, residual sugar, tannins, and fruit, complement each other so that no single one of them is obtrusive on the palate. (Young wines are expected to exhibit more marked tannins than mature ones however.) This extremely important wine characteristic is quite unrelated to flavor.
Layman’s terms from Kori:
A well-balanced wine has a good blend of fruit with acidity, tannins, and alcohol. Nothing stands out in isolation.
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