Wine terms: Reserve
When is a wine term not really a wine term? When it’s the term reserve, which is used to imply that the wine is of better quality, as in reserve cuvee or winemaker’s reserve.
The truth is (in the United States, anyway) that the word reserve has no legal meaning. It can signify wine made with great care and effort, or it can be be nothing more than a marketing ploy.
The confusion stems from the law in certain European countries, where there are legal requirements about what can be called a reserve wine. In Spain’s Rioja, for instance, a wine can’t be labeled Reserva unless it has been aged at least three years, with 12 months in oak. A Gran Reserva wine needs three years in oak and five years aging overall.
In the U.S, on the other hand, I can ferment orange juice in my refrigerator, bottle it, and slap a label on it that says Wine Curmudgeon special reserve and no one would have a reason to complain. (About the label, anyway.)
American winemakers borrowed the term, if not always the rationale for applying the term. Is this something that needs to be fixed? Probably, though it’s well down the list of label-related issues facing the the industry and federal regulators. (Currently, the biggest problems are deciding how to determine an American Viticultural Area, or AVA – where the grapes are grown that go into the wine, and whether wine needs nutritional labels like soft drinks and canned corn.)
So what’s a wine drinker to do? Tread cautiously, and use common sense. That bottle of $4 wine that says special reserve probably isn’t. Reserve should imply wine made a certain way or meeting unique conditions. One of the best examples is a Texas cabernet sauvignon from Becker Vineyards. Becker has other cabernet, so it has labeled the wine, made with grapes from Newsom Vineyard in West Texas, a reserve.
Finally, look for hierarchies from the same producer, where the $10 bottle of wine doesn’t say reserve, the $18 bottle says reserve, and the $30 says special reserve. That usually means someone at the winery is thinking in terms of quality.
And don’t even ask about restaurants that have “reserve” wine lists. Reserve wine makes me cranky enough.
