Unless you’re a wine professional, you probably don’t have time to taste hundreds of wines (enjoyable though that would be) in order to choose the right one for next week’s dinner party. Fortunately, any wine label will tell you enough about the bottle’s contents to at least rule it out, and many will hint that this may be the right one. In just ten minutes, you can learn enough about label-reading to at least fake it the next time you go to a nice restaurant. And the best place to start is French wine labels. “Why French?” I hear you ask, and “Does this mean I have to learn the language?” The answer to the second is an emphatic No. You only need to recognize a few key words. As for the first, if there’s one thing the French like as much as wine, it’s bureaucracy. (Guess where the word comes from.) Consequently, French wine production has been increasingly regulated for more than a hundred years, and the labels reflect that. You will always find certain information on every French label (in addition to volume, alcohol content, and producer name). Since the French are generally the world’s biggest producers and consumers of wine, most other countries adopted similar labeling policies (if not the same degree of regulation).
