Help with a Wine term

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Arneba28

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My one roommate has possible the worst taste in alcohol of anyone I have ever met. She loves fruity foo foo wines. Well she came back with a strawberry wine called "Strawberry Dreams Forever", a cute little pink label with clouds and strawberrys etc etc. Well I take a sip just to try.
#1 It finished with a slickness on my tongue that wouldnt go away
#2 and a slight bitterness after the overpowering sweetness.

What are the terms for this stuff. Like Beer has DMS for the butteryness etc.
 
Umm...several come to mind...Ripple...Thunderbird...

Only, I'm betting that it was over 15 bucks a bottle!

Pogo
 
strawberry wine
Usually when you start with the phrase "strawberry wine" you've passed any need for wine terminology. Not to knock what anybody might enjoy drinking, but if you get into serious wine tasting (which I've not done, just brushed the surface) a strawberry wine would probably not be on the list.

Rick
 
Well, the butter and slickness is caused by the same chemical, and from the same cause, they probably dropped the temp at the wrong time during fermentation, causing loads of diacetyl to be producted. The overpowering sweetness is due to way too much wine conditioner or sugar after they killed off the yeast. The bitterness is a different story, in the strawberry wines I've done, only one has had any bitterness, but it was more like astringency, which was caused by the wild ferment's lag time (at least, that's what I attribute it to) this will go away with alot of aging. I'm sorry you had such a bad experience with strawberry wine, a properly done one is really good and complex, not as much so as like, a old vine zinfindel or something, but still quite good. Go to a hippy community or something and get a swig off of their flask of strawberry wine, and then you know what strawberry wine should taste like.
 
I've found that most commercial Country wines are way to sweet and the best thing to do is make it yourself. Strawberry and Raspberry wines are fine dry at least in my opinion. Commercial wineries stop fermentation before all the sugar is turned into alcohol or they can add a conditioner and additional sugar before bottling to stop fermentation. Like someone else said, try to get a homemade bottle and you will see the difference. Also there are a ton of books(wine for dummies etc) and websites (winespectator, winetv) that explain all the tasing terms and help break down the differences to help you know what you do and dont like so you can make educated decisions before a purchase. Although I tend to like very dry big reds, I've never met a red (grape) wine I didnt like. Good luck, Ken
 
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