SOYOUWANNA LEARN THE BASICS OF WINE?

5. LEARN THE BASICS ABOUT VINTAGES

The word vintage is simply a fancy way of saying "year." Just like the NFL draft or Party of Five, different years will produce differing qualities of the final product. Snobs and pretentious folk refer to the different years as vintages. The reason different vintages produce different quality wines — despite the fact that the same vintner is using the same wine-making process on the same kind of grapes — is that small variations across any number of factors can affect the entire yield of wine in a given season.

Remember how yeast converted the natural sugar in grape juice into alcohol? Well, what do you think would happen if the level of sugar were higher or lower in a given year? Obviously, you'd get variations in the level of alcohol, which in turn, imbues the sauce with different levels of kick and other characteristics. What typically regulates the amount of sugar in the grapes is largely the amount of rain that falls close to harvest time, so vintners get very nervous about the weather close to harvest time. And because the weather cooperates to greater and lesser degrees in different years, different vintages will have better or worse wines.

So although old wine is a crude shorthand for good wine, you should always remember that keeping a cruddy vintage around for a decade won't make it better than a two-year-old hotshot. This added wrinkle will unfortunately complicate your task because you can't simply order the oldest wine on the list if you're looking for the "best." Don't fear though; the wine geeks of the world have compiled handy-dandy little indices that are about the size of a golf score sheet. On them, they list the major types of wine from major wine-producing regions and rate the quality of each vintage. Check out the chart of Wine Enthusiast magazine.

If you want to rock on a date, steal the wine list, bring it to the bathroom, and bust out a copy of your chart. You'll be able to spot the great wines and hopefully find an affordable one. Of course, unless you're dating a sommelier, all this effort will be lost and you'll be found out anyway. Ah well, at least you'll impress the waiter.