What does Reserve mean?

Question

What does Reserve mean? when u see it, in a wine bottle?

Answer 1

It depends on which wine you see the word on.

If it is on a US wine, it means whatever the winery wants it to mean. It has no legal meaning, it is used as a marketing tool on most wines. If it is a reliable winery that you trust then you trust Reserve means it is a better than the standard bottling.

If it is a wine from the EU then it has legal meanings depending on which country it comes from. For a Spanish red wine Reserva refers to the amount of time the wine has been aged before release -- a year in barrel plus at least 2 years in bottle. On a Portuguese red wine it is used on a wine from a better vintage and with more alcohol, on Italian wines Riserva again refers to extended aging, exact rules depending on which part of Italy the wine is from.

The USA Wine Institute asked the BATF in 1994 to make a ruling on the use of Reserve on USA wines, and they published a paper asking for feedback (see http://www.wineinstitute.org/industry/reflib/pub/fed/fedregister/ReserveNPRM.htm ) but as far as I know, no decision was made.

Answer 2

a winemaker here in napa actually told me it doesn't mean anything. Well...it means whatever the winery wants it to mean. Ordinarily most wineries use it to mean their best wine. However, I don't always believe that. Some of my most favorite wines are what the winery would classify as lower tier. and I find their supposedly best "reserve wine" to be crap.

I also hear the same thing on the San Francisco wine program called "In Wine Country" Europe doesn't even really use the term because they have different naming requirements.

And to poster above, James G, Vintner's Reserve Chardonnay by KJ, is produced in the tens of millions. I print their labels and they do 10,000,000 chardonnay per year, so hardly a limited selection.

Answer 3

It usually means that fewer bottles were produced. With the larger wineries like Kendall Jackson, Yellow Tail, and Sutter Home they produce thousands upon thousands upon thousands of bottles of each type of wine. If it says reserve it's usually a more select grape and more monitored fermentation/blending. With the lower cost wines I honestly can't tell too much of a difference between regular and reserve, but with some of the mid-range and higher cost wines I can definitely tell a difference. Some sommeliers would like you to think that reserve immidiately means better, but it's up to the drinker to decide that.

Answer 4

I was told that if a winery had a particularly good wine for one year they would hold some back, Reserve it for a year or two, to boost the price.