I'm re- releasing on of our most listened to episodes from Jan 2024 with additional edits and bonus content!

If you've ever felt a bit (or totally) overwhelmed by all of the wine bottles staring back at you from their store shelves, you’re going to want to listen in as I give you some simple hacks to help you pick the right wine each time.

I’ll break down:

• How to decipher wine labels to look for clues to pick your perfect style
• How the bottle shape can clue you in as to what’s inside if the label isn’t obvious 
• What the location in the store (and even on the shelf) can tell you about the wine

These quick and simple ideas should help you feel more confident next time you find yourself in the wine store so you don’t just select your wine by the coolest label (which might be ok too, as long as you like what's inside!)

Resources I mentioned:

Grab my Wine Tips Cheat Sheet Here

The App I love is VIVINO

One of my favorite wine books is The Wine Bible. You can get the newest edition on Amazon here

Nikki's Links:

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Another bottle shape that you might see a little bit less often is one that slopes straight down. There's no shoulders, but then that bottle has hips like me. So what can you tell from that?

Hello and welcome to Sip with Nikki. I'm Nikki Lamberti and I am back in Sonoma County, California after travel my home state of New Jersey last week.

I hope you enjoyed the episode All About Super Tuscans with cameo appearances from mom and dad, AKA Little sue and Big Dominic.

So have you ever found yourself standing in a store, a wine shop, in front of shelves and shelves of wine and you're literally like, I have no idea. I am overwhelmed. There are too many. This one's pretty grab and go. If that has been you, no shame in that game. I have done that as well.

But you're really going to want to listen in today because I'm going to break down all things shopping for wine, specifically when you're shopping in person. But a lot of these can also transfer too.

If you're making an online purchase, whether a retailer like total wine or wine.com or even a winery, we're going to get into some real clues that you can use from the wine bottle's label, from the shape of the bottle, even from the location on the store shelf.

And I'll give you some general guidance that should help make shopping for wine and picking something that you're happy with less painful and more exciting and rewarding than something that you'll want to buy again. And the goal is that you'll be a little more strategic next time you're in that situation.

You can use these quick tools that I'm going to give you and pick the right wine.

And since you're interested in the tips about wine, if you haven't already received my downloadable wine tips cheat sheet, just go to my website sipwithnikki.com resource and I will send you this PDF downloadable file for free. And many of the concepts that I'm about to talk about in this episode are there.

So it'll be a great review but give you some visual graphs and pictures to go along with the tips I'm giving you today. So here we go with don't judge a wine by its bottle or do.

I get it Shopping for wine can be overwhelming, even for someone like myself who is certified and studies this stuff. Sometimes when I am standing in front of a shelf of wines, it's daunting.

So I have received a lot of questions about how to make sense of it and how to approach it. So I thought I'd give you some really simple tips that you can think about next time you are standing in front of those shelves of magical bottles.

And hopefully it'll make it a lot less intimidating and even more enjoyable. The first thing that we want to talk about is using the labels.

Now that seems obvious, but there are a couple of specific things on wine labels that are going to help guide you in your shopping and your decision making. And it's human nature to be attracted to pretty labels, just like books. But like books don't judge a book by its cover or a wine bottle by the label.

I know it's very easy to just say, oh, I picked this one cause it was pretty. But you wanna look at some other things too to make sure that you're making a good choice. Now, the artwork on the label is important.

Don't get me wrong. When we were designing our label for Solobato, our wine brand, there was a lot that went into what that would.

But we also want to try to strive for picking a wine when we're shopping where what's inside is just as beautiful and has received as much thought and care as what's on the outside. So, first things first.

One of the biggest differences between how we label wines here in the US and other countries that I'm going to group into what we call New World versus Old World. Think Europe, Italy and Spain and France, Germany. Those are all going to be considered Old World.

And that term really comes just because those regions have been making wine for a lot longer. Just like the countries, the architecture, the infrastructure of those countries is a lot older than the U.S.

whereas New World would be us, would be Australia, would be South Africa, most of South America, Chile, places like that, Basically all the Southern hemisphere making wine, plus the U.S. canada. Yes, they make wine in Canada. We're going to call that New World. Okay, here's a tip.

Most Old World wines, and this is just a general rule of thumb, of course, in recent years, there are going to be some exceptions in how places and producers are labeling. But again, you'll hear me say this all the time.

Generally speaking, the biggest difference between how wine bottles are labeled from the Old World, Europe versus the New World everywhere else is that here in the New World, we Label by the grape, if we can. So Cabernet Sauvignon, the name of a grape. Chardonnay is a grape. Sadden. Gervaisy, One of my favorites is a grape. Okay?

And as long as a wine is 75% or more of one type of grape might be blended with a little bit of something else. But 75% or more, we are just calling it that grape on the label.

Whereas, let's say a wine from Bordeaux, a region in France that has Cabernet Sauvignon in it. But guess what? They're not going to label it by the grape. They're going to label it by the place. Chateau Margaux. The place.

The producer, not the grape. What the heck, Nikki? That's confusing. How do I know then, what I'm looking at? Yeah, New World wines are just a little bit more straightforward. So.

So I'm gonna give you some tips on wines of the Old World. How do you decipher that? And how do you know what the actual grape is once you've started to figure out, hey, I like Cabernet or Merlot or Zinfandel.

I just figured that out now. How do I know how to find it in this store? We're gonna break that down.

So I said, as long as a wine is 75% or more, we can call it that grape on the label. But what happens if it's not? What happens if it's 33% of one grape and 20, 27% of another and so on and so forth?

Well, that's a blend. And sometimes you'll see it very straightforward on the label. It says red blend, but sometimes it'll say cuvee, which is the French word for blend.

And then other times, you won't see either one of those terms on there, but you'll see a fancy proprietary name like Insignia or Opus One or Apothec or Menage a trois.

Right.

Blends can be high end or low end. Or my personal favorite blend name, Fortunato from Napa Valley. Yes, I'm biased. That's my blend that I make.

Those are all blends. Those are proprietary names that the producer has chosen to put on the label in place of a pretty generic term blend.

So if you're looking at a label and you don't see anything that resembles the name of a grape, Cabernet, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Zinfandel on the label, and you just see a fun name, then it's a proprietary name, and it is a blend. Okay? Now, blends can be High quality. And blends can be low quality. Blend. The word is not synonymous with quality. Okay.

It's just telling you that there's either enough of one grape in that blended wine to put it on the label or not 75% or more. Put it on the label, the name of the grape. And now it's time for listener questions. Listener questions.

If you have a question for a future episode, please email me at nikkiipwithnikki.com or you can message me on Instagram ickylamberdi or on Facebook. So Jason wants to know, do different bottle shapes mean anything in wine?

So, historically and pretty classically, there are two typical bottle shapes for wine. And one of them is going to be probably what you most think of with the wine bottle, where it's tall and lean.

And we say that it has shoulders, right? So it comes down from the neck and then right away at the top of the bottle, it fans out, has shoulders and goes straight down.

Another bottle shape that you might see a little bit less often is one that slopes straight down. There's no shoulders, but then the bottle has hips like me. So what can you tell from that?

Traditionally speaking, you're heavier wines, especially red wines, especially like a Cabernet Sauvignon, those generally have been bottled in the ones that have the shoulders. Why? Because those wines can gather some sediment in the bottle.

And the point of the shoulders in the design was, as you're pouring it, those shoulders are keeping back some of the sediment. I talked about this a little bit on an earlier episode about decanting.

Whereas generally lighter bodied wines like Pinot Noir, which is a lighter red wine, lighter color, lighter weight or body, lighter tannins, that's usually in a bottle that has hips. So that's just a tip about the bottle size. So when does this come in handy?

If you are in a great wine shop that has everything laid out in sections and you are in the French wine section, which is a pretty broad term, but sometimes, depending on where you're shopping, they're not going to break it down more specifically into Burgundy, Bordeaux. They're going to just say France. Look at the shape of the bottle.

If you're in the France section and the bottle is tall with shoulders, that's probably going to be more of a Cabernet Merlot, Cabernet Franc, what we call a Bordeaux style blend, which is referring to those red grapes that are originally from Bordeaux, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Malbec and Petit Verdot.

And it's generally going to be a bolder, bigger red wine versus the bottle from France with hips is going to be generally from either Burgundy in that region. The red grape they grow there is Pinot Noir, so lighter. It could also be from another well known wine region of France called the Rhone region.

And that's where they grow Syrah and Grenache, some of my favorites, which are generally speaking, a little bit lighter, less bodied, less sediment in the hippie bottles than in the shoulders. So think about that. That's a great clue because again, on the label it's not going to tell you the name of the grape on the bottle.

It's going to say Chateauneuf du Pape. I'm going to give you a tip in a minute as how to know what the grapes might be in a bottle that's called Chateauneuf du Pape, which is a place.

To recap, generally speaking, Old World, we're going to say most of Europe is labeling by the place and new world, like the US and Australia and South Africa wines, we are labeling by the grape. So that's the first thing is use the bottle shape as a tip.

Now the next thing you can do.

Is familiarize yourself with some regions. So just like I said, okay, Bordeaux in France, I know that generally those are gonna be wines that are driven with Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot.

And I like those. Those are some of my favorites. So I'm gonna shop for or wines from Bordeaux.

There are some great resources that you can use to learn just some quick tips about what grapes come from what part of the world. And that can help you once you know your preferences and in guiding you when you're in the store.

A great book that I got very early on in my studies over a decade ago is the Wine Bible by Karen McNeil. The wine Bible. Now it's up to three different volumes. You can get em on Amazon. It's a big soft cover book.

And the Wine Bible is really a go to when you want to start just understanding a little bit more about different grapes from around the world and what are their characteristics and and what are they known for? I'll put the link in the show notes for the Wine Bible, but huge proponent of that.

Now you may not be as nerdy as someone like me and some of my wine counterparts where you're going to bring that Wine Bible into the grocery store, but I bet you have your phone on you when you're in the store. So another great tip and I have absolutely no affiliation with this app.

Hopefully one day maybe there'll be a sponsor of the podcast, but it's just something that I use all the time. And I'm like, oh, my God, why didn't I create this app? It's called Vivino V I V I N O again, I'll put the link in the show notes. Vivino.

This app is amazing because when you are in the store, you can open this app and scan any wine label. And it's going to bring up a lot more information besides the clues that you can get just from the label on the bottle.

And it'll also bring up reviews of other wine drinkers. And one of my favorite things that it'll bring up is like a sliding scale of the character of the wine.

So from sweet to dry, it amasses all the people that have reviewed it in the app and says, it's on this end of the spectrum or that end of the spectrum. It'll do the same thing with boldness and tannic. And then you can see other people's reviews and then you can see the facts.

You can see if it's a blend, when you scan it and go into the nitty gritty, it'll actually tell you, oh, it's a blend of mostly Grenache and Syrah. So once you know you like those grapes, there you go. It's just those things are not always on the label.

So Vivino is a great app that I'm a huge fan of. It's also nice just because it saves the wines that you scanned and then you can write them.

So it's just good for you to remember, oh, what was that bottle that I bought or that I had, you know, at Christmas? And you can just pull it up and it catalogs them for you. It's brilliant. Again, wish I created it. Props to the Vivino people.

Some other clues that you can use from the label would be the vintage, right? The vintage or the year? The date, the year that you see on the bottle. Now, what does that tell you? That's when the grapes were picked.

But really, for most of us everyday wine drinkers, why this matters, the year or the vintage when the grapes are picked, because that's just going to tell you, is that a young wine? Is it, quote, fresh, it was bottled recently or has it got some age on it? Right.

And again, in a previous episode when I was talking about aging wines, we talk about how wines change. So go back to listen to that episode. But generally speaking, a younger wine that has a more recent vintage is going to be just more fruit forward.

The fruitiness about that wine is. Is going to be in the spotlight. It's what's going to lead the character of the wine. So if you like that.

For instance, in the sipping with my sister's episode, you'll hear my older sister Dana talks about she loves a big California fruit bomb, is what she says. Right. So generally speaking, a younger wine with a more recent vintage on the label is probably going to be more in her wheelhouse.

Whereas my younger sister Amanda in the episode talks about how she likes wines that are a little more subtle in nature, where the fruitiness is there, but it's not necessarily the leading thing that you notice about the smell and the taste of the wine. So she might look for an older vintage if it's available now.

A lot of times older vintages are going to have a little bit of a higher price point just because of scarcity. There's not as many of those bottles around on the planet anymore.

So sometimes you do pay a premium for that, but if you know that's what you like, then usually it's worth paying for. Right. So vintage is when the grapes were picked. Also, I get a lot of questions about the word reserve. So sometimes you'll see reserve on a label.

What does that mean? Generally, it means it. It's more expensive. But why?

So the thing to know about the term reserve in the Old World, in Italy, in Spain, when they use reserve, or in France Grand Cru, there are legal regulations on what that means and what criteria the wine has to meet in order to use those terms on the label. In the us there's no regulation on that. You can put reserve on any label.

But what most producers are telling you, when they call something a reserve, it means it's the best of something. So it could be certain barrels when they were aging and the winemaker tasted and said, ooh, those are the best barrels. They just taste the best.

The wine in those barrels is going to be the quote, reserve, and it'll be pulled off for a separate bottling. It could mean that the wine came from older vines. Maybe those vines have been producing grapes for 30, 40, 50 years.

And maybe the producer's perception is that gives you the best or the biggest or the most intense character of the wine. They might Call that reserve. And usually reserve also means that there's less of it made compared to another wine that producer makes.

So again, supply and demand. That's why it's usually more expensive.

But just know that if it's on a bottle from the US or other New World countries, there's just no legal specification on what that means. But it's the producer telling you it's the best of the best of something. Another great tip to look at is alcohol by volume.

The alcohol percentage legally has to be on all labels.

And what that tells you, besides the obvious of how many glasses is it going to take before I feel this wine in my head, which you may or may not want to do, generally speaking, a wine that has a higher alcohol by volume, especially a red wine from California where it's 14, 15, maybe even approaching 16% alcohol by volume, not only is that wine clearly higher alcohol, but in the glass and in your mouth, it's going to feel weightier, bolder, richer. So if you like that, that's what that's telling you.

If you prefer lighter, fresher, more subtle wines generally look for a lower alcohol, especially in reds, 13 to 14%. It doesn't sound like a huge difference. Wine that's 13.5 versus 14.5. But in a couple glasses, multiply that out by volume.

That's why it's called alcohol by volume 1%. It'll sneak up on you and it'll make a difference. Why are wines different alcohols, and what drives that? It's really driven by climate.

And then there's winemaking in there as well.

But when you grow grapes in warmer climate regions, we're going to call California, Napa, Sonoma, where I live, we're going to call that warmer climate. More sun and UV and warmth in the growing season on the vines. That means those grapes are more ripe when they were picked. Ripe means sugar.

And when you pick those grapes and you put them through fermentation and the yeast do their job and all the sugar becomes alcohol. If the sugar was high at the time, then the alcohol is going to be high.

When the fermentation's complete now the sugar is gone, but you'll have higher alcohol versus grapes that are growing in cooler climate regions, they weren't as ripe when they were picked, so they won't be as high alcohol. Or as a producer, as vineyard managers, vineyard owners, you can also decide when to pick.

And if you want it to be a bolder, richer, riper wine that has high alcohol, you let those grapes stay on the vine longer, pushing that ripeness up. So those are some of the things that drive the alcohols.

If you haven't already downloaded my wine tips sheet on my website, sipwithnikki.com win resource, you will see I created a very simple visual of Old World versus New World wines and how climate affects the character of the wine, but it also does affect the alcohol by volume. So if you know that you like a bigger, bolder, richer style, that is a clue that you can also gain from the label.

And then finally, the back label of the wine, oftentimes, not always, but often will have some kind of story that.

The producer wants to share with you.

Whether it's about their family and how many generations they've been making wine, like the Antonori family in Italy and Tuscany. Gosh, I think they're in 16 or 17 generations of making wine.

Or maybe it is a brand where they give back and they are active in some type of philanthropy or giving back proceeds. They support a cause with your purchase.

So it's important to read that and also be aware if that's something that is important to you and that you would like to support through your purchase.

Sometimes on the back label there'll be some notes from the winemaker about what to expect of hints of this and notes of that. Just remember that when we say hints of BlackBerry or vanilla or tobacco or leather, those things have not actually been added to the wine.

And on a future episode, I'm going to talk all about why do we think we smell and taste blackberries and vanilla and tobacco and wine? We'll talk about that.

But just know when a back label makes reference to those things, they have not literally been added into the wine, but somebody has decided that the wine is presenting notes of that either on the nose or in the mouth. So to recap, you can gather a lot of clues from the label.

Once you know what type of grapes are being grown in what regions of the world and you know that you like that grape, you can start to shop for wines from that region using the Wine Bible Great reference book or the app Vivino as a guideline. When you're there in the moment in the store are two great tips that I recommend. And the more you do it, the less intimidating it gets.

One last bonus tip, the level of the shelf. So if you're standing at a typical, think of like a grocery store shelf or a wine shelf and there's three or four or five shelves from top to bottom.

Generally speaking, the higher up you're looking, top shelf, here's where that term comes from. Those are generally going to be higher end, more expensive wines.

Bottom shelf is going to be your jug stuff your high production, widely distributed wines. No judgment about any of those shelves, but it's just a guideline. So recently my mom was asking for some tips.

She was shopping for some wine for an event and I said, well, how much do you want to spend? And she told me the budget. And I'm like, you're going to be between shelf three and four. So she's five one.

I think I'm like, so it's pretty much going to be your eye level or higher is where you want to shop. But if you've never noticed this, think about it next time you're in the store.

Generally the prices go from low to high as you're looking at those shelves.

So if you're going in for one particular bottle for a gift and you know what your budget is, you can guide your eye level into that general vicinity and make your selection within that. I very much hope that this is helpful for you next time you go into the store. Think about these things.

Open up your Vivino app, plug in your wine bible if you must, but hopefully things like location in the store, bottle shape, listing on the label, story on the back, all of these things will guide you to making better decisions in the store.

Clear as mud, right? No, hopefully clearer than mud. Keep these tips in your back pocket next time you go shopping and send me a note.

Nikkiipwithniki how did your last trip to the store go? Did you use these things? Was it helpful? I'll keep giving you more if you tell me that they're helping.

And if you use the code podlistener I'll give you 10% off your order at Solavato wines.com the link is in the show notes.

Multiple customers have already placed a second order because they already drank the first.

If you're enjoying the podcast, please rate and review in the podcast platform when you're listening and share it with someone you know that will enjoy learning and sipping with me as well. And whatever you do between now and next week, I hope that you sip well.