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Whether you're trying to craft a food and wine pairing menu, want to become a wine negociant, or are just looking to learn about wine, there's a lot to consider.
Keep reading to get greater insight into a wide array of wines from our comprehensive red wine types chart and white wine types chart. Whether we are talking about regular wines, vegan wines, or certified gluten-free wines, it all applies. You can also read our article on health benefits of wine to increase your knowledge even more!
Match Bars & Restaurants to Wine Types Chart
Matching your restaurant or bar atmosphere with the best wine for serving your dining or drinking ambiance takes comparison. As the wine industry grows and wine enthusiast, Wine add to an authentic, thoughtful experience while casually eating out or celebrating life events.
Assembling your wine list means looking at the connection between types of wine and customers. See which additions to the wine list will drive sales and improve customer satisfaction—before specifics like wine age, dryness, year, and wine storage requirements.
BinWise can help as your wine tracking app to find out which items and inventory is working best. Here’s how you can match wines with drinking and dining styles:
Wine Types Chart (Region, Season, and Vine Growing)
Winemaking is a subtle art. It's closely linked to the climate, season, and soil conditions in the region where the wine type's grapes actually grow. As a result, exceptional wines carefully consider the details of their "terroir" (natural environment).
See how regions of origin, seasonal differences, and soil composition completely changes the wine aroma, grape size, and wine product. The final wine and alcohol content shifts and pivots with each of these differences too.
Understand how to select types of wines for your customer by anticipating their flavors and pairing wines with confident knowledge to promote them:
Red Wine Types Chart
Contrary to popular belief, red wine types don't have to be heavy and dry affairs. There are dessert reds, sweet reds, light reds, fortified reds, and more. Flavors can also range from fruity to earth and there’s great variance in the wine alcohol content and calories in red wine. The more important thing is to pay attention to the body and sweetness so you can pick the type that best fits the situation.
Here are the 10 most common red wine types by aroma, body, and sweetness:
White Wine Types Chart
White wine types are often the easiest for beginners and come in a wide range of flavors and sweetness. White wine pairs particularly well with seafood dishes and is the best wine to pair with salmon. They are generally light or medium-bodied, so they tend to be less complex and easier for an untrained palate to explore and enjoy. However, white wines do tend to have higher calories in white wine, so you should make sure you stick to the standard wine pour if you’re worried. You should also explore the best white wine types and see which ones are better to start with.
Here are the 10 most common white wine types by aroma, body, and sweetness:
What Makes a Wine Dry?
If the charts above are at all confusing, it’s likely because the term dry doesn’t seem like it would be the opposite of sweet. Isn’t that sour? Well, in the wine world, dry identifies a particular phenomenon where the acidity, tannins in wine, and aroma all work together to make your mouth feel drier after a sip of wine. In general, higher acidity and an increased amount of tannins, like in deep red wines, will lead to a dry wine.
Dryness can be evaluated after the first sip as your taste buds can feel as though they didn’t just have a liquid on them. Many people love this feeling and often these wines can be some of the most enjoyable to drink, especially when paired with food. Dry wine is ideal for meat-based entrees–learn more about the best wine to pair with turkey, chicken, and beef before crafting your pairing menu. Though tannins play a role, wine doesn’t have to be red to be dry. In fact, some of the most popular white wines like Chardonnay and Pinot Grigio are renowned for their dryness.
What Makes Wine Sweet?
Sweetness in wine is a much clearer concept than dryness and can often be discovered by smelling wine. If you get a sweet fruity aroma from a wine, the odds are that the wine will be sweet or semi-sweet. This is due to the low acidity and low amount of tannins imparted by the light-skinned grapes used during fermentation. Wines that have the flavor of figs, raisins, or jam are some of the most common sweet wines.
Often the addition of additional sugar in wine will also overpower any dryness that naturally occurs. This is why fortified red wines are often much sweeter than their more natural counterparts. Wines like vintage ports can be surprisingly sweet while still being such a deep red that you should still invest time in learning how to remove red wine stain.
Straight From the Chart
Red wine and white wine come in a wide array of flavors, sweetness, body, and more. Use the charts above to make more informed decisions. Whether you're looking to increase your restaurant profit margin, need more wine varietals to upsell, or just want to try something new, there are plenty of options at your disposal.
Make sure to stay on top of your wine knowledge. One of the best ways to do that is to look at the most famous wine lists or most popular wine lists in the country. There are so many types of wine lists you can create, so looking at the competition can really make a difference! You should also learn the proper way to handle different wines. Preventing wine oxidation or dealing with bottle shock can help keep you from having a bad day.
There are hundreds of wine varietals on the market ranging from dry to sweet, fruity to earthy, and with a range of calories in wine. This can make it very difficult to choose the right wine for the right occasion-including Valentine’s day promotion ideas for restaurants.