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Red or White, Dry or Sweet?
Selecting the Right Wine for You
By Felicia Hodges
If you've ever sat and stared at the wine list in a restaurant trying to decide which one would satisfy your palate, chances are you may only know about the wines you've actually sampled before. You want to venture into un-tasted territory, but you have no idea which wine to try. Are there any hard and fast rules to help you find your way through the maze of wines on the liquor store shelves?
"It used to be that red wines go with red meats like beef, and white wines go with white meats like chicken and seafood," says Maureen Carr, who owns and operates Harvest Wines and Liquors, Inc. in Newburgh, N.Y. "But people don't go for that as hard and fast anymore. If you like red wine, you tend to drink red wine and if you like white, you tend to drink white."
But, short of tasting every wine on the market, how do you know what you'll like and what you won't? Most wine lists offer a brief description of each wine, but since several terms appear over and over again, knowing them will help the descriptions make more sense.
For example, wines are often categorized by their sweetness or lack thereof. "Brut" wines are not sweet at all (referred to as "dry"), while "demi sec" wines are fairly sweet. Terms like "off-dry" (very slightly sweet), "extra dry" (medium sweet) and "sec" (slightly sweet) are also used. Most champagnes are brut while dessert wines are demi sec. The term usually appears on the label somewhere under the brand name.
Also, wines are often named after the type of grape they were made from (like Merlot or Zinfandel) or the region in which the grapes were grown (like Champagne, which is a region in France located about 90 miles northeast of Paris). For the record, only bubbly made from grapes grown in the French province should be called champagne. Most manufacturers call other bubblies "sparkling wine."