There are two factors in determining the colour of a wine: the skin colour of the grape varietal, and the process the grapes go through when they are made into wine. Although red grape varieties are generally used to make red wine, their red colour would not be retained if the grape skins were not soaked with the juice.

Wine Appearance: Refers to a wine's clarity, not colour. Common descriptors refer to the reflective quality of the wine; brilliant, clear, dull or cloudy for those wines with visible suspended particulates.

Unlike most agricultural crops, the grapevine does not require fertile, rich, soil to thrive, and the world's finest wines are nearly always produced from poor quality soils where few other crops would be worth planting.

There are four fundamental factors that give wine with its characteristics: grape variety, soil, weather and winemaking technique: rich, low-lying valley floors and river deltas where so many crops thrive are not usually the best locations for growing wine grapes.

Wine was probably discovered by accident somewhere in the Fertile Crescent, the agriculturally generous expanse of river valleys extending from the Nile to the Persian Gulf.

If you're looking to improve your knowledge and appreciation of wine, then it's always a good idea to start with the basics. In this section, you can take a step back in time and look at the history of wine , and how it has evolved over the years, including the important influence New World wines have had on the wine industry.

A wine label is not just an attractive final touch to the bottle; it is a guide to its contents. Although you can see for yourself whether the wine is white or red, it is also useful to know which grapes the wine is made from, where they were grown, who made the wine, and when. With this information, you'll have a good idea of the style of wine you're buying.

To really understand and enjoy wine, it helps if you can appreciate the role that the balance of alcohol, tannins, acidity, flavour and other components make in producing the finished product. It is up to the winemaker who manages the process from vineyard to bottle to manipulate these components to produce their desired style of wine.

The French appellation system is the most widely known system of quality control for wine. Other European countries have roughly equivalent gradings, though some have more categories.