What is the difference between white & red wine (other than the colour & name)?!
What is the difference between white & red wine (other than the colour & name)?
I started wondering this today. I am not a drinker of wine but I would like to slip into it's ranks.
Answers:
I agree with most of what Paul Ding said, especially about the color due to crushing of skin. Majority of wines are from red grapes - whether red or white wine. It's the process of taking out the skin early in fermentation process that determines the color - no skin contact with the juice results in white wine; lots of skin contact with the juice results in red wine. Best example of that is Zinfandel - when you leave skin on, you get (red) Zinfandel; when you take the skin off, you get White Zinfandel; same grape, two very different wines of different taste and different color.
In addition:
Health: Red wine is healthy for your heart, white is not; it has to do with the skin of the grape containing chemicals that is good for your cholesterol and for your blood vessels. You can get the same effect with red grape juice or extract.
Taste: Red wines tend to be more jammy and berry in taste, with chocolate and curran. White wines tend to be more crisp and floral and fruity, less jam and practically no chocolate.
Tannin: Red wine has a lot of tannin - so, one of the most common thing people notice is that red wine "puckers" - has that bitter taste. So a lot of white wine drinkers are not used to that taste. White wine do not have tannin.
Storage: Red wine is stored typically at 50-55F. White wine is stored at lower temperature, of 45-50F. Red wine also can be kept far longer than white wine partly because of the presence of tannin. The degradation of tannin in red wine is what makes older wine taste better - wearing out of the bitter tannin brings the fruit that is hidden underneath.
Bottle shape (sort of): if you look at wines, different types of wine have different bottle shapes. Red typically have darker glass in addition. http://www.cellarnotes.net/bottleshapes....