One bottle of wine contains roughly 1.2 kilograms of grapes. That is somewhere between 600 and 800 individual berries, all crushed together. It takes a full vine's annual production to fill about one bottle.
There are an estimated 10,000 grape varieties in the world. Only a few hundred are used commercially. The top ten varieties account for roughly a third of all wine production globally.
A standard wine barrel holds 225 litres. That fills exactly 300 bottles of 750ml. A barrique, the Bordeaux-style barrel, is the most widely used size in the world.
The human nose can detect more than one trillion distinct smells according to recent research. A trained palate can distinguish between many of the several hundred aromatic compounds found in wine. This is why tasting is a skill that genuinely improves with practice.
France has more than 350 officially regulated wine appellations. Italy has 77 DOCG appellations alone and is still counting.
The world's most expensive wine bottle ever sold at auction was a bottle of Romanee-Conti 1945, which fetched 558,000 US dollars in 2018. That works out at around 740 dollars per millilitre.
A single glass of Champagne contains approximately 11 to 49 million bubbles, rising from nucleation sites at the bottom of the glass. They rise from nucleation sites: microscopic imperfections in the glass or a speck of dust. A perfectly clean glass can be almost bubble-free.
The finish of a wine is measured in seconds. Under ten seconds is short. Ten to twenty seconds is medium. Over twenty seconds is long. A truly exceptional wine can hold its flavour for thirty or forty seconds after swallowing.
