What are legs in a wine glass and do they tell us something about the quality of the wine? Legs are the little “drippy” things on the inside of a wine glass after you swirl the wine around. They only tell us how viscous a wine is, not whether it’s good or bad.

No and no. At least, not necessarily. There’s a common misconception floating around that mono-varietal or single-varietal wines are better quality than wines that are blends, and part of this stems from the confusion around what to call certain wines. Truth is, there’s no real, measurable correlation in quality based on whether a wine is single-varietal or a blend. Some of the “best” wines in the world are blends and so are some of the worst wines in the world. The same is true for single-varietal wines — they comprise some of the best wines in the world and also some of the worst. So what’s the deal then between single-varietal wines and blends?

The short answer is both. Chablis, Bordeaux, Burgundy, (and Rioja, Barolo, Chianti, etc.) are both a type of wine and a place, but they are not a type of grape. It’s no surprise there’s a lot of confusion surrounding this concept, especially noting that the paradigm for how we think about and “label” wines in our own mind is completely different in the U.S. than it is in the Old World, hence the confusion.

“Old World” refers, essentially, to Europe, and “New World” refers essentially to the rest of the world (Asia, not included). You can think of Old World as any country that was at one time a colonial power, and “New World” as any country that was at one time a colony (again, Asia, not included). By this heuristic, “Old World” means France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, etc., and “New World” means the Americas, Australia, South Africa, etc.

The answer is it depends. In its purest form, it's just the grapes that give wine all its exciting, unique flavors. The grapes themselves offer near-infinite different possible flavors and flavor combinations to a wine based on what type of grapes are being used, the blend of grapes (if blended at all), the soil in which the grapes are grown, the climate in which the grapevine lives, etc., etc. Grapes are beautiful in how expressive they can be of micro-terroirs (tiny changes in the ecosystem in which the vines grow), which is what makes wine such a unique offering to begin with: you can taste almost anything under the sun in wine. From charcoal to honeysuckle, from goatskin to melon, from tobacco to seawater — you can taste almost anything in wine, and it’s f***ing delightful and exhilarating! Wine, in its purest form is liquid natural history in a bottle that we get to taste and enjoy…

Orange wine is technically a style of white wine made from white grapes (not oranges) and their skins. The nomenclature “orange wine” is derived from the wine’s seemingly peculiar color in the glass and not the fruit from which it’s fermented. Other pseudonyms include “amber wine,” “copper wine,” and “skin-contact wine”…