2007-05-04 17:37:15 · 5 answers · asked by dad_e_man 1 in Food & Drink ➔ Beer, Wine & Spirits
The date of harvest.
The harvest is in 2006, yet the wine finished and bottled in 2007. The vintage date on the bottle will be 2006 regardless of bottling date.
2007-05-04 18:30:53 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 1⤋
The date on the label is the date of the vintage, i.e, the year the grapes were picked.
In the northen hemisphere it is the year that grapes grew, since the flowering is around May and the vintage around September.
But the wine that is made from those grapes could possibly be bottled more than a year later. The vintage year on the labels will still be the year the grapes were picked.
There is only one exception that I know of -- grapes for the rare ice-wines (made in Canada and Germany/Austria) stay on the vines long after all the other grapes are picked and are often harvested in the new year winter when it is cold enough to freeze them. They will not show the vintage when they were picked, but the preceeding year, i.e. the year they grew.
The pupose of the vintage is toidentify they year the grapes grew, since some years have better weather than others and thus make better wines.
2007-05-06 06:53:35 · answer #2 · answered by Pontac 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
this is actually not an easy thing to answer.The simple answer is that the date on the bottle for wines grown in the US is year in which the grapes are picked. It has nothing to do with when it is bottled. A wine could be picked in November and then not bottled until January.
There are also other requirements about percentage of grapes picked etc. See first article. right now american wines need to be 95% picked during one year to be considered vintage. Other countries it is less.
If you want to get totally technical about it, see 2nd article attached from TTB. The USA government agency that monitors and approves all labels for domestic wine.
2007-05-05 01:12:21 · answer #3 · answered by Lisa H 7 · 0⤊ 3⤋
The year the grape were picked... I know of one near exception : Australia... They get to have a magic 15% of whatever they want in their wine, EX: you buy a Shiraz 2002, well 15% of maybe from a different type of grape and/or year!! Go OZI!!
2007-05-05 02:20:37 · answer #4 · answered by deepthrought 3 · 0⤊ 2⤋
When the wine was bottled.
2007-05-05 00:41:20 · answer #5 · answered by Cheffy 5 · 0⤊ 4⤋