Looking at a Wine: What Colour Tells You
Step 1/711 min read0% read
Looking at a Wine: What Colour Tells You
What's ahead
11 min readBeginner
By the end, you will be able to…
- Tell what to look for in a glass: clarity, intensity, hue
- Read the colour of a red and a white at three ages
- Recognise what colour does not tell you: neither quality, nor age on its own
Step 1/7To begin
Three things to look at
Before smelling or tasting, you look. A wine's colour gives you a first set of clues: about its age, its concentration, sometimes its grape. Clues, not proof — and that is what this course is about.
Clarity
Clear or hazy? A deposit at the bottom of an old red is nothing unusual: it is pigment and tannin that have settled out.
Intensity
Pale, medium or deep: how dark the colour is.
Hue
Purple, ruby, tawny; lemon-green, gold, amber: the shade, which moves with time.
Step 2/7Chapter 1
Colour lives in the skin
The juice of almost every black grape is colourless. The colour sits in the skin, as pigments called anthocyanins, and it only reaches the wine if the juice is left in contact with the skins. Everything else follows from that.
Red
The juice ferments with the skins, for days or weeks: this is maceration.
White
The grapes are pressed first, and the juice is separated from the skins before it ferments.
Rosé
Black grapes, but brief contact: extraction is stopped before it gets as far as red.
Two reds from the same grapes: one macerated for a week, the other for three. Tasting them side by side, what most likely sets them apart?
Step 3/7Chapter 2
A red as it ages: from purple towards orange
A red's colour, from youth to age
Younger
PurpleYoung
The pigments are still largely free, not yet bound to tannins. The rim shows bluish-purple tints.
Ruby to garnetMature
The pigments bind with tannins into more stable pigments: the colour moves away from purple.
TawnyAged
Some of the colouring matter settles out and slow oxidation does the rest: the colour leans towards orange and brick.
Older
Two reds from the same grape. One has a purplish rim, the other a clearly orange one. Which is probably the younger?
Step 4/7Chapter 3
A white as it ages: from green towards amber
Over time, a red slowly loses intensity; a white, for its part, darkens. Pale yellow to begin with, it turns golden, then leans towards amber and copper.
Young: pale, green tints
Common in young whites, often from cool climates and unoaked.
Mature: straw to gold
The colour turns golden with age.
Aged: amber, copper
Slow oxidation. Usual in an aged sweet wine or one aged in contact with air, fortified or not; in a dry white, the sign of very advanced development.
Two Chardonnays from the same harvest, served side by side: one is pale, the other distinctly golden. Which explanation is most likely?
Step 5/7Chapter 4
Rosé: a colour of method
In a rosé, colour mostly tells you how it was made, and from which grape. A few hours of skin contact separate a pale rosé from a deeper one, and temperature counts as much as time. Direct pressing, where the grapes are pressed straight away or after a few hours' maceration, generally gives pale rosés.
Pale is not better
A very pale rosé and a raspberry-pink one were made differently, or from other grapes. Colour does not rank rosés.
Orange is not necessarily old
Salmon is common with Grenache and direct pressing; Grenache shows orange tints from the start.
A Grenache rosé has a salmon colour. What can you conclude about its age?
Step 6/7Interactive exercise
Six colours to read
Here are red and white at three ages. Tap a colour to read its name, its rim and what lies behind it. Then play: a red or white colour appears, and you say whether the wine is young, mature or aged.
Step 7/7Chapter 5
What colour does not tell you
The grape
Thin skin, often a pale colour: Pinot Noir, Gamay, Grenache. Thick skin, a dark colour: Syrah, almost bluish when young, or Cabernet Sauvignon.
The cellar
Time on the skins, oak, ageing in contact with air: so many decisions that change the colour while saying nothing about age.
At dinner with friends, two reds from the same year are served side by side. One is clearly paler than the other, and your neighbour concludes: "The pale one must be the lesser wine."
What is the most likely explanation for the difference in colour?
Key takeaways
Three ideas to keep
- The juice of almost every black grape is colourless: colour lives in the skin, and reaches the wine through contact with it.
- Over time, a red moves from purple towards orange; a white darkens, from green towards amber.
- Colour gives clues, not proof: the grape and the cellar weigh as much as time.
Words from the course
- Colour
- A wine's colour, which gives first clues to its age, its concentration, sometimes its grape.
- Rim
- The wine where it thins out against the bowl, glass tilted: that is where the hue reads best.
- Anthocyanins
- The pigments in the skin of black grapes, which colour red wine.
- Maceration
- The juice's contact with the skins, which gives it colour; in a red, colour comes out mostly in the first days.
- Direct pressing
- Pressing black grapes straight away or after a few hours' maceration: it generally gives pale rosés.
Going further
- In the encyclopedia:Red winemakingRosé winemaking
- Next course: Why Wines Differ