Picking a bottle of wine can be overwhelming, as the choice can seem endless as supermarkets can dedicate multiple shelves for their stock.
For those who enjoy a glass but don't consider themselves to be a vino expert, it can be intimidating to understand each wine's flavour profile, which are often not-quite straight forward. Picking up what you believe to be a sweeter wine may be prove to be drier on the tongue.
While there is always the option of picking the cheapest bottle with the most attractive label, one expert has shared an easier way to tell if a wine is right for you. According Carlos Santos, sommelier and Wine and Operations Manager for Humble Grape, one "hidden" detail on a wine's label can tell you more about how it tastes.
Explaining where it's exactly located, Carlos told the Mirror: "A question that we often get asked on the floor in the shop is about whether a bottle of white wine is dry or sweet, there is a rule to navigate that. You will need to look at the back of the label, turn the bottle around and look for the alcohol level of the wine."
To help demonstrate, Mr Santos compares two bottles of Riesling wine, which can vary between sweet and dry. One label displays a 7.5 per cent alcohol content, while the other wine from the same vineyard is 12.5 per cent.
He added: "The rule of thumb here is that the lower the level of alcohol in the wine, the chances are there will be more sugar left in the wine because the fermentation has not finished and the yeast has not consumed all of the sugar that was left in the wine. So this wine should be quite sweet.
"In the 12 per cent alcohol bottle, chances are this wine is much, much drier as it means that the yeast has consumed all the sugar which is why there's more alcohol."
The expert went on to warn that a pretty bottle did not necessarily indicate that the wine was good quality, while a simple design similarly did not indicate lower quality. He claims instead the snazzily designed wine bottles are simply to help the product stand out on a supermarket shelf when there's so much other competition.
Carlos advised that if you want to buy the prettiest or the cheapest bottle of wine available, that's completely fine to do as "the best wine in the world is the one that you like."
However, he warns that the same mass-produced wines produced by companies each year may taste a little more "chemically" than others, which is something to take into consideration.
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