The history of the wine dress

The "Robe" of the wine is in fact the visual aspect: during a tasting, it is the first thing to look at! It gives us many indicators about the wine:

🔴 Colour: a dark wine will generally be stronger in the mouth while a light wine will be lighter;

💧 Clarity: a clear wine is often a sign of quality. However, do not confuse a cloudy wine with deposits;

✨ Brightness: a very bright colour often reveals the acidity of the wine. A light, bright wine reveals a young, lively wine, while a dark, dull wine is a sign of a heavy wine.

• Did you know that a wine wears a dress?

More precisely, the robe of a wine is its colour and all its nuances.

The saying goes that the clothes don't make the man, but looking at a glass of wine in good conditions (brightly lit room) can give us a lot of information.

We can, for example, detect the type of grape variety just by looking at the intensity of the colour of the wine through the light.

Gamay is a red grape variety with little colour, as you will see from the wine, whereas Cabernet-Sauvignon has a very intense colour.

The colour of the robe allows us to judge the evolution of the wine. For example, young dry white wines will mostly be light yellow with green reflections, then evolve towards a straw yellow colour and then towards copper reflections for the oldest.

For red wines, the colour will range from purplish for the youngest to brown for the oldest.

Finally, viscosity can be observed through the drops that run down the side of the glass (oenologists refer to these as wine tears). The thicker and slower the tears, the sweeter/more alcoholic the wine.