How to choose a wine in a shop

A shelf with hundreds of bottles gets much easier once you narrow it down by a handful of facts that are printed on almost every label. This guide walks through those facts in the order that saves the most time: colour, sweetness, origin and grape, vintage, and price.

Start with the colour and style

Decide which type of wine you are looking for before you read a single label. The main groups are red, white, rosé, orange, sparkling and fortified. Many shops group wines by colour, though some arrange them by country first, so look at the aisle signs before you start. Either way, this first choice removes a large part of the wall in front of you.

Style is the next layer inside a colour. A white wine can be light and crisp or rounder and fuller; a red can be pale and delicate or dark and dense. If you do not know a style by name, remember a bottle you enjoyed and describe it in plain words: light or full, fresh or soft.

Decide where you sit between dry and sweet

Sweetness is the quickest way to rule bottles out. Think of a ladder that runs from bone dry to dessert sweet, and pick the rung you usually prefer. Many labels say where they stand with a single word such as dry, off-dry, medium or sweet, in the language of the country the wine comes from.

Be careful with sparkling wine: the same word can mean a different level of sweetness there than on a still wine. The full list of terms is in “How to read a wine label”.

Read the origin and the grape

Labels tend to follow one of two conventions. Many European labels lead with the place, such as Rioja, Chablis or Chianti, and leave the grape unnamed because the rules of that place already decide which grapes are used. Many labels from other parts of the world lead with the grape instead.

Both tell you something. A grape suggests a flavour family; a region suggests how the grape was grown and made there. Once you know that you liked a particular grape or a particular region, you can look for it again on any shelf.

• If the label names a grape, note it: it is the easiest thing to remember and repeat.
• If the label names only a place, note the place and the style of wine it is known for.
• If a protected origin mark is printed, it means the wine follows the rules of that named place. An American Viticultural Area (AVA) on a US label says where the grapes were grown, not which grapes or methods are used.

Look at the vintage

The vintage is the year the grapes were harvested, not the year the bottle was filled. Many everyday wines are made to be opened within a few years of harvest, so a recent year is normal on a simple white or rosé. Sparkling wines are often non-vintage, marked NV, which means they blend several harvests on purpose.

A vintage is not a score. It is a piece of information: use it to compare two bottles of the same kind, and ask the staff whether an older vintage is available.

Set the budget before you look

Fix a price range first and read the shelf tag, not the bottle. In the US, sales tax is usually added at the till, and member or multi-buy prices may appear next to the regular one. If the tag shows a unit price (per litre, or per standard bottle), use it to compare bottles of different sizes. Abroad, convert the price into your own currency before you compare, otherwise a familiar-looking number can hide a very different amount.

A budget is also a filter. Within that range, the steps above soon bring the shelf down to a short list.

Remember what you liked

Choosing gets faster the more you know about your own taste. After you open a bottle, write down the grape, the region and where it sat on the sweetness ladder. Do the same for a bottle you did not enjoy. After a few notes a pattern will appear, and that pattern is the best guide you can take into a shop.

Let a photo do the first pass

If reading every label is the slow part, Easy Wine App, an AI sommelier for iPhone, can do the first pass. It works from one photo of a whole shelf, so there is no need to scan wines one at a time. You photograph a shelf, the app reads the labels it can see and ranks the wines by the colour and sweetness you like and by your budget, with a short reason for each suggestion. You can mark wines as Not for me, Liked it or Loved it, and they are kept in My wines. AI can be wrong, so always check the bottle in your hand. For tips on taking a readable picture, see “How to photograph a wine shelf so the labels can be read”.