What does Vintage Mean?

When it comes to wine, vintage is the big one, the thing most people tend to find complicated and confusing. But the bottom line is that it’s all actually quite simple. A wine’s vintage simply tells you which year the grapes were grown, and harvested.

So why does Vintage matter? It matters because it helps the consumer know what year he or she prefers in a particular type of wine. Vintage in a wine can tell you tell you all sorts of information about the weather from that particular year. Which in turn can effect the grapes quality or condition and in return effect your taste in the wine.

When looking into the vintage year, you want the year where the grapes grow and swell in the early summer rain and then ripen slowly in the sun until the early autumn without too much rain before harvest. This will bring out some of the best grapes, creating the most enjoyable wine for your palate. On the other hand if the year had a wet summer followed by a wet fall right before harvest, you will notice a completely different grape, diluted from its natural sugars creating less concentration and alcohol content for the wine.

So a vintage on a wine may not always guarantee a great quality in the wine, it simply tells you when the grapes were harvested.

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