Types of Wine: Red, White, Champagne, Rosé and Sweet

About one bottle in a hundred is still improving five years after it was made. Which category it belongs to is the first filter on whether yours is that one.

There are five types of wine worth separating if you buy to keep: red, white, Champagne, rosé and sweet. The split is not about colour. It is about what happens to the grape skins, and about what is left in the bottle to hold the wine together afterwards. Red ferments on the skins, and that is where colour and tannin come from. White is pressed off them, so acidity does the preserving instead. Rosé takes a few hours of skin contact and stops. Champagne is a base wine given a second fermentation inside the bottle you buy. Sweet wine holds sugar the yeast never converted, because botrytis concentrated it beyond what yeast can finish or because a spirit stopped the ferment, and in sherry the sweetness is blended in afterwards. Tannin, acidity, sugar and alcohol are the four preservatives, and knowing which one your bottle runs on tells you how long it has.

We carry the figures that make that filter worth applying. An estimated 90% of wine is meant to be consumed within a year of production and 99% within five years, and only 5 to 10% improves after one year, with about 1% improving after five to ten. The same page names the assumption that costs people money: "There is a widespread misconception that wine always improves with age." Ageing changes a wine. It does not automatically improve it.

What are the five types of wine?

Five categories, four mechanisms, and one table that does most of the work.

Type	What happens to the skins	What preserves it	Where the collectable end sits
Red	Juice ferments in contact with skins, pressed at or after the end of fermentation	Tannin	The 1855 Médoc and Graves classification
White	Pressed off the skins before fermentation	Acidity	Burgundy grand cru and premier cru
Champagne	White or lightly pink base wine, second fermentation in bottle	Acidity plus lees ageing	Prestige cuvées such as Dom Pérignon and Cristal
Rosé	Two to twenty hours of contact, then off	Acidity	Rosé Champagne and rosé prestige cuvées
Sweet	Varies by route: botrytis, fortification, or sweetening after a dry ferment	Sugar, and often alcohol	Sauternes, Tokaji, vintage Port, Frasqueira Madeira

Red wine: what maceration buys you

Red is the only category defined by prolonged contact with the skins, and that contact is the reason so much of it is worth keeping. "Much of the red wine production process involves extraction of color and flavor components from the grape skin." Pressing "usually does not take place till after or near the end of fermentation", which is the reverse of white.

Fermentation temperature is the lever that decides the wine's working life. Cooler ferments at 25 to 28°C "produce fruitier red wines for early drinking", while 28 to 35°C "produce more tannic wines designed for long aging". Tannin extraction is the part that happens late: colour and fruit come out during cold pre-fermentation maceration, while tannins are extracted "in post-fermentation maceration when alcohol is present". A decision taken in the second week of the ferment sets whether the bottle has three years or thirty.

The market's oldest shorthand for which reds have the long version is the 1855 classification of the Médoc and Graves. The Wine Cellar Insider counts 61 châteaux on the list: five First Growths, fourteen Seconds, fourteen Thirds, ten Fourths and eighteen Fifths. The five at the top are Lafite Rothschild, Latour, Margaux, Haut-Brion and Mouton Rothschild, and Mouton got there late, elevated from second growth in 1973 after what we describe as "decades of intense lobbying by the powerful Philippe de Rothschild". A ranking drawn up in 1855 still sets the reference price for the category, which tells you how sticky reputation is in red wine.

The atlas puts every one of those estates on the ground: start at Château Lafite Rothschild or open the Bordeaux producer atlas and work down the tiers.

White wine: what preserves it if there is no tannin?

Acidity does. White wine is "a wine that is fermented without undergoing the process of maceration, which involves prolonged contact between the juice and the grape skins, seeds, and pulp", and the ageing literature is explicit about the consequence: "The acidity in white wines, acting as a preservative, has a role similar to that of tannins in red wines."

Two things surprise people. First, white wine does not need white grapes. Colour-skinned grapes qualify "provided that the obtained must is not stained", and as we note, "Pinot noir, for example, is commonly used to produce champagne". Second, white ferments run cool, around 18°C, because "beyond 35 °C the micro-organisms begin to suffer and fermentation slows then stops".

White Burgundy is where the collectable end of the category lives, and it comes with the tightest hierarchy in wine. The BIVB counts 84 AOCs in Bourgogne, made up of 7 régionale appellations, 44 village appellations and 33 grand crus, which it notes is "more than 23% of all AOCs attributed to French wines". We show how thin the top is: grand cru is 2% of production at 35 hl/ha, premier cru 12% at 45 hl/ha, village 36% at 50 hl/ha. Montrachet and Corton-Charlemagne sit at the summit of the white side. Domaine Leflaive and its neighbours in Puligny are on the Burgundy producer atlas.

There is one risk in this category that does not exist in red, and any buyer of mature white Burgundy needs to know it. We describe it as "a flaw that occurs in white wines, when the presumably ageworthy wine is expected to be in good condition yet is found to be oxidised". According to the same entry, the affected vintages are "predominantly from the late 1990s, and in particular those of 96, 97 and 98, [ 3 ] until". Nobody agreed on the cause. Clive Coates blamed poorly performing corks; Steve Tanzer pointed at a combination of corks, overripe fruit from warmer years, excessive lees stirring and insufficient sulphur dioxide. The practical effect is that white Burgundy from that window trades at a discount that has nothing to do with the wine's quality on release.

Champagne: what does the second fermentation buy you?

Time, and a legal minimum of it. The Comité Champagne puts maturation on lees at "at least 15 months" from the second fermentation stage. Vintage Champagne waits longer again: we put its minimum at three years. That ageing is the whole point of the category. It is a white wine that has been made to wait.

Three grapes do almost all the work, Pinot noir, Pinot meunier and Chardonnay. Small amounts of Pinot blanc, Pinot gris (called Fromenteau in Champagne), Arbane and Petit Meslier are vinified as well. The Comité Champagne's own style list runs to six: non-vintage brut, blanc de blancs ("A Champagne all finesse and lightness"), blanc de noirs ("A full-bodied, heady Champagne"), rosé, demi-sec to doux, and vintage, "A Champagne to celebrate the best years".

Above all of that sits the prestige cuvée, defined as "a proprietary blended wine (usually a Champagne) that is considered to be the top of a producer's range". Dom Pérignon from Moët & Chandon and Cristal from Louis Roederer are two of the six examples we name, and they are the bottles that make Champagne a traded category rather than a consumed one. The rest of the region is on the Champagne producer atlas.

Dosage is the last decision before the cork goes in, and it is the number on the label that most buyers read past. Commission Regulation EC No 607/2009 sets out the EU sugar-content terms

Term	Sugar, grams per litre
Brut nature	0 to 3
Extra brut	0 to 6
Brut	0 to 12
Extra dry	12 to 17
Dry (sec)	17 to 32
Demi-sec	32 to 50
Sweet (doux)	50 and above

Brut and extra dry are not synonyms. Extra dry is sweeter than brut, by up to 17 grams a litre against 12. That inversion catches people out at the shelf and at the auction catalogue.

Where does sparkling wine that is not Champagne fit?

Under the same physics, with a different bill. The useful line is not Champagne against everything else. It is bottle-fermented against tank-fermented.

Fully sparkling wines are "generally sold with 5 to 6 standard atmospheres (73 to 88 psi; 510 to 610 kPa ) of pressure". The same entry puts semi-sparkling wines between 1 and 2.5 atmospheres, and notes that EU rules define sparkling wine as exceeding 3 atmospheres. Champagne, Cava and Franciacorta use the traditional method: the second fermentation happens in the bottle you buy, and riddling and disgorgement remove the dead yeast.

Prosecco is the counterexample and the reason the category confuses people on price. It is made from Glera, with up to 15% other permitted varieties, and "the secondary fermentation takes place in large stainless steel tanks rather than in each individual bottle", with a minimum production time of 30 days and up to around nine months for the Charmat Lungo style. Roughly 150 million bottles were produced in 2008, and by 2018 that figure approached 600 million. Tank fermentation makes the wine "less expensive to produce", and Prosecco should be drunk young, preferably within three to five years. Volume that size, at that speed, does not create a secondary market. Tank-method sparkling is a drink. Bottle-fermented sparkling with a declared vintage is an asset. Price them accordingly.

Rosé: how is it actually made?

Three ways, and two of them are legal almost everywhere.

The first is skin contact cut short. Black-skinned grapes are crushed and "the skins are allowed to remain in contact with the juice for a short period, typically two to twenty hours", against days or weeks for a red. Colour is a dial: "The longer the skins are left in contact with the juice, the more intense the color of the final wine."

The second is saignée, from the French for bleeding, where "some of the pink juice from the must can be removed at an early stage". This one is a by-product of red winemaking, since drawing juice off concentrates what is left behind for the red.

The third is blending red wine into white. It is "uncommon and is discouraged in most wine growing regions", and French law forbids it with a single exception: Champagne. Which is why rosé Champagne is the one rosé with a real collector market. It can be made by the saignée route, leaving "the clear juice of dark grapes to macerate with the skins for a brief time", or by the more common d'assemblage method, blending "a small amount of still red wine to a sparkling wine cuvée". La Grande Dame and the prestige rosés built the same way are where the category's price history actually lives.

Sweet wine: four ways sugar survives the ferment

Sweetness is a residual sugar number before it is a style. Under EU Regulation 753/2002, a still wine is dry up to 4 g/L of sugar, medium dry up to 12 g/L, medium up to 45 g/L, and sweet above 45 g/L. What separates a great sweet wine from a cheap one is how the sugar got to stay.

Route one: the yeast could not finish. In Sauternes, Botrytis cinerea infects Sémillon, Sauvignon Blanc and Muscadelle, which leaves the grapes "partially raisined, resulting in concentrated and distinctively flavored wines". The geography does it: autumn mist from two rivers "descends upon the vineyards from evening to late morning", then "the warm sun will help dissipate the mist and dry the grapes to keep them from developing less favorable rot". The cost of that is brutal. At Château d'Yquem, "on average six tries through the vineyard are undertaken each year to ensure that only the botrytized grapes are selected", yields average nine hectolitres per hectare "compared to the usual twelve to twenty hectolitres per hectare in Sauternes", and average production is 65,000 bottles. In a poor vintage the château judges the entire crop unworthy of its name and sells it anonymously, which has happened for 1910, 1915, 1930, 1951, 1952, 1964, 1972, 1974, 1992 and 2012. The 1855 Sauternes and Barsac list today ranks one Premier Cru Supérieur, d'Yquem, above eleven Premiers Crus and fifteen Deuxièmes Crus.

Route two: sugar beyond what alcohol can reach. Making Tokaji Aszú means picking botrytised berries individually, trampling them "into the consistency of paste (known as aszú dough)", then pouring must or wine over it for 24 to 48 hours. Concentration was historically counted in puttony, baskets of about 25 kilograms added to a 136-litre Gönc cask, running from 3 to 6 puttonyos, though the modern system classifies on sugar and sugar-free extract in the finished wine. We give Eszencia as the extreme case at 500 to 700 grams of sugar per litre, and above 900 in the 2000 vintage, so concentrated that its alcohol "never rises above 5-6 percent".

Route three: a spirit stops the ferment. Port is made by "the early interruption of the wine's fermentation process via the introduction of a neutral grape spirit" called aguardente, which leaves residual sugar and lifts the wine to between 19% and 22% alcohol. Vintage Port sits in cask "a maximum of two and a half years before bottling" and is "designed to age another 10 to 40+ years in the bottle". Late Bottled Vintage is bottled between four and six years after the vintage, and Colheita is a single-vintage tawny aged at least seven years. Madeira takes the same fortified base and heats it. In the cheapest route, heated tanks, the wine goes "to temperatures as high as 130 °F (55 °C) for a minimum of 90 days" under Madeira Wine Institute rules, while the best wines age by canteiro, in rooms warmed only by the island's climate. Frasqueira must spend at least nineteen years in cask and one in bottle, so it cannot be sold until it is twenty. Once opened, a vintage Madeira "can last for decades".

Route four: the sweetness arrives afterwards. Sherry is the category most often misfiled. "Most sherries are initially dry, with any sweetness being added later." Fino and Manzanilla are fortified to 15.5% and age under flor, "a yeast -like growth that helps protect the wine from excessive oxidation", while oloroso is fortified to at least 17% and oxidises openly. The solera moves wine down a chain of three to nine barrels so every bottle carries a fraction of much older wine. The sugar spread across the category is wide: fino runs 0 to 5 grams a litre, cream sherry 115 to 140.

If a sweet wine is already in your cellar, the question is timing rather than price. The drink-now window checker shows what is inside its window this year.

Which types of wine hold their value?

The ones whose preservative is doing real work. Reds need phenolics: "a high level of flavor compounds, such as phenolics (most notably tannins), will increase the likelihood that a wine will be able to age." Whites need acidity, doing the job tannin does in red. Fortified wines get alcohol, which "was found to act as a preservative, allowing wines to survive long sea voyages". Rosé and tank-method sparkling have none of the three in quantity, which is why almost no rosé outside Champagne has a secondary market.

Set that against the base rate. If 90% of all wine is meant to be consumed inside a year and only about 1% improves after five to ten, then the collectable end of each category is a rounding error on world production. The price you pay reflects the scarcity of the exception rather than the merit of the type. Fruit does not wait either: "Fruitiness deteriorates rapidly, decreasing markedly after only 6 months in the bottle." A wine with nothing behind the fruit has nowhere to go.

The market index tracks the traded end of all five categories together, and the scoring methodology sets out how the 40% critic and 60% CellarTracker weighting is built.

Read the type, then read the score

Knowing the category tells you what a wine is made of. It does not tell you whether this bottle, in this vintage, is one of the few worth holding. That is what the score is for: every wine on this site carries a single number built from 40% critic consensus and 60% CellarTracker drinker consensus, so you can see where the professionals and the people actually pulling corks disagree, which is usually the most interesting thing on the page.

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