It is important to note however that the color indicates a relative age of the wine to itself, you cannot directly tell, say, this wine is 5 years ol because it has a ruby-garnet color...

Therefore a ruby-garnet wine may be 10 years old - in which case you know its is a good vintage as well as a quality producer, but then a ruby-garnet wine might as well be 1 years old, in which case you know that it is eiher a poor vintage or a more generic, mass scale production one.You can find out more about the aging curve on the pieces of the puzzle page.

There is something else to the eye and just by looking you can have an informed guess about the ripeness of the grapes when harvested. The berries collect sugar as they ripen, and in turn this sugar will create the alcohol in the wine.

Swirl the wine slowly in the glass for two seconds. Then stop, and look at the side of it. You will see little drops developing and falling back to the bottom. How thick or thin they are and how fast or slow they move is the question. The good sign is if they are thick rather than thin, but most importantly they move slowly. Observing this, you can be sure that your claret was made using ripe grapes - that is to say, the berries had adequate sugar when harvested.

Later you will find out that there are different sorts of ripenesses, sugar ripeness is one of them, while phenolyc ripeness is something else. To make matters complicated these do not necessarily go hand in hand...but more about that later.

These droplets you see are referred to as legs, or tears, or even cathedral windows... but you want to know what is happening, and why is it a sign of ripeness of sugar (or the lack of it thereof?)When you swirl the wine basically you cover the inner side of your glass with 3 things, water, ethanol and glycerol. Ethanol is the main alcohol of wine and it is the ethanol - or ethil alcohol content - you see on the label expressed by volume of the wine.

It is created by the fermentation of the sugar. Thus more sugar in the must, potentially more ethanol. But what is glycerol then? Glycerol is the secondary alcohol of wine, but when it comes to observing the 'legs' it is more important for us. It has a viscous, sticky quality, it sticks to the side of the glass. When you taste the wine, this alcohol gives it roundness, mouthfeel.What important is that the amount of glycerol is directly proportional to the amount of ethyl alcohol produced during fermentation. More alcohol, more glycerol. Although the type of yeast used for fermentation also has it's part to play.

Glycerol, being an alcohol evaporates considerably faster than water. What you see falling back are water droplets, and what there is between them and in their way is - guess? - glycerol.This is why you can assume that, the slower these 'legs' move, the more glycerol there is in their way. And that is a good sign of course, as you can be sure that they have a higher alcohol content as well, so the wine is made from berries that had adequate sugar content when harvested.Let me stress again, there are different sorts of ripenesses and sugar ripeness per se does not guarantee quality. About all of this serious technical stuff you can read about in the pieces of the puzzle section, as you know by now.