Wine

Wine Styles are an extremely difficult subject, and every book or website on wine has its own version of a wine style classification scheme. Examples of wine style categories can be found in popular books by wine writers Oz Clarke, Jancis Robinson, Michael Broadbent. All have different wine style categories and description that are always similar yet different.

Talking about wine is like talking about fruit in general. One needs to be able to compare apples to apples, and distinguish cherry from banana, but also lemon from grapefruit.

This is why winestyles are important and necessary to classify categorize and talk about wines based on their TASTE characteristics.

Indeed wines can come from different wine areas, have a different grape mix .. and still belong to the same style class.

And, as taste is subjective, there will always be debate over style categories and the grey zones between them.

Therefore Wine Styles can only be useful if we think in terms of the 80/20 rule - and not focus on the exceptions that set the rules.

The most complete research to integrate all information available on wine style taxonomies and classifications was done as part of the ISWN project in the period 2000-2003. The resulting ISWN Wine Style Framework has a Popular and a Sommelier framework consisting of 10 and 38 wine styles respectively.

This information is free and available in the public domain. More information can be found on www.iswn.org under the Wine Styles menu. Several sites on the internet use this ISWN Wine Style Framework, e.g. see the Styles section on www.warpa.com