Some wine drinkers declare that a red wine should be allowed to ‘breathe’ in the bottle before it is poured. Frankly, this doesn’t do much to improve the wine.

• The surface area of the wine in the bottle neck is so small that hardly any oxygen can reach the wine in the hour or two in which it is left standing.
• If you really do want to oxygenate the wine, decant it by pouring it gently down the side of a glass decanter.
• Some older red wines develop a sediment at the bottom (or side, if the bottle has been stored lying down) of the bottle.
• This is not a sign of any defect, but if you prefer to keep the sediment out of the glass, you can also pour the wine carefully into a decanter, leaving the last bit, with the sediment, in the bottle.

Almost all wines contain sulphites. This is because Sulphur dioxide is used to get rid of unwanted wild yeast and other organisms, which would spoil the wine or reduce its shelf life.

The level of Sulphur permitted in South African wines is, in fact, lower than that allowed in most European wine-producing countries.

Grapes vary slightly with regards to their individual needs but they will generally thrive within certain climatic conditions. An average annual temperature of between 14-15°C, with summers not less than 19°C would be ideal.

The summers should not be too hot and autumn should not be too cool. The vines need around 675ml of rain per year, with the majority of showers in the winter and spring months. Too much rainfall in summer and autumn can harm the grapes. They become overblown and watery—and the wine tastes like that too. The weather, as we see, is a constant worry for grape growers.

As a white wine ages, you see a change in the composition of those colours: an older white wine will become more golden. And if it still has a little of those green hues, that indicates it’s still likely to have some freshness and vitality about it.

I have often heard winemakers say the wine has not been filtered, but only ‘racked’. Sometimes they add that the wine was ‘fined’. What’s this all about?

These are all ways of clarifying wines by removing the suspended particles, particularly yeast (the lees). Once the lees have settled at the bottom of a barrel or tank, the wine can be gently pumped out from a level higher than that of the lees. This way the lees are left lying at the bottom of the tank and the clear wine is drawn off. Fining is done by adding certain substances (like egg white) to the wine. The egg white spreads across the surface of the wine and then slowly sinks to the bottom of the tank, taking all the suspended particles down with it. The clear wine can then be drawn off and bottled. These processes are considered preferable to filtration, in which the wine is pumped under pressure through a series of paper filters to remove any sediment. Filtration sometimes removes some of the flavours of the wine, and can leave a slight ‘cardboard’ taste in the wine unless it is very carefully done.