Wine Styles Guide

Tannin, acidity, body, sweetness, sparkling, fortified. The building blocks of every bottle.

Acidity in Wine

Acidity is what makes wine feel alive on your palate. It's the mouth-watering quality that refreshes between sips and keeps a wine from tasting flabby. Without it, even excellent wine feels one-dimensional.

Wine Body: Light, Medium, Full

Body is what your mouth feels when you drink wine. It's the weight and fullness on your palate, created by alcohol, tannin, sugar, and extract working together. A light-bodied wine feels delicate and thin. A full-bodied wine coats your mouth and feels substantial.

Champagne & Sparkling Wine

Sparkling wine is wine with trapped carbon dioxide from fermentation. The bubbles cut through fat and richness better than any still wine. This makes it the most versatile bottle in your arsenal — as useful at brunch with fried chicken as it is at midnight with oysters.

Fortified Wine: Port, Sherry & More

Fortified wines have had spirits added during or after fermentation, pushing alcohol to 15-22% abv. This isn't a gimmick—it's a production choice that creates wines with intensity, complexity, and staying power that still wines can't match.

Wine Sweetness: Dry to Dessert

Sweetness in wine comes down to one thing: how much sugar the yeast left behind. Most wines you drink are dry, meaning the yeast converted nearly all the grape sugar into alcohol. But sweetness is a spectrum, and where a wine falls on it changes everything about how you drink it and what you pair it with.

Tannin in Wine

Tannin is what makes red wine grip your mouth. It comes from grape skins and feels like dryness on your gums and the inside of your cheeks. The sensation isn't a flavor—it's a physical texture that either softens or hardens depending on what you eat alongside it.