Acetic: Acetic acid is the acid that gives vinegar its characteristic taste. Small amounts of acetic acid are normal in wine. The threshold is .5 gram/liter; amounts over 1.0 gram/liter give wine a vinegar-like character.

Acidity: Grapes have two primary acids: tartic and malic. Many other acids exist in wine. Acid gives the wine body and is considered the spin of the wine. Good acidity can make a wine taste good with food. Too little acid and a wine can be flabby; too much acid and the wine appears hard to drink.

Barrel Aging: Oak barrels allow the wine to oxidize at a nice pace, as the oak has small pores that allow small amounts of oxygen into the wine. The oak allows flavor and aromatic compounds to mature and change.

Barrel Fermentation: The conversion of grape juice into wine, while in an oak barrel. Oak allows for a slow level of evaporation, and also influences the flavors and aromas and bouquets of wine.

Bloom: Flowering of the grapevines, this may be the grapes most critical point of development.

Botrytis: Botrytis is known as “the noble rot.” Typically, botrytis is not welcome in a cluster unless it is a dessert selection in the vineyard.

Brix: Taken with a refractometer and expressed in degrees: unfermented grapes, degrees of Brix are approximately the same as percent of sugar. After fermentation, the alcohol concentration is roughly half the sugar concentration of the juice.

Bud: A small protuberance on a stem or branch.

Bud Break: When the first shoots emerge on a vine after winter dormancy.

Cane: The previous season's shoots that have been left to mature.

Canopy: The leaves form a Canopy like covering on a grape vine.

Cap: The grape skins that float to the top of a fermentation tank.

Clarify: Refers to the removing of old lees-dead yeast cells and fragments of grape skins, stems, seeds and pulp from the fermented juice.

Clone: A sub-group within a variety of genetically identical plants propagated from a single vine to perpetuate selected or special characteristics.

Cold Stabilization: A technique of chilling wines before bottling to cause the precipitation of tartrate crystals.

Complexity: The term used when a wine has multiple flavor and aroma characteristics from the vineyard source, winemaking techniques and/or bottle development.

Corky: An "off" characteristic in wines due to imperfect corks. Often caused by the chemical compound trichloroanisole or TCA, TCA diminishes the fruit character of the wine, substituting a character like old beach towels or old wet cardboard.