My friend Stefano argued he can’t find any difference among wines and feels perplexed when sommeliers use all sorts of spice and fruit adjectives to describe them.

You know, wine is just grapevine juice where fermentation transformed sugar into alcool. Water, alcool and tartaric acid. This is all you need to synthetize something that’s technically 99.99% wine. The problem is, if you try tasting this fake wine you quickly discover it’s ugly, has no aroma and feels completely uninteresting. This is because the last 0.01% is what makes a wine great: hundreds of aromatic chemicals. And this is the only part you should care for. Read the rest of this entry »