Apparently long-suffering Europe has ceased complaining about our tendency to anglicize its wine types. At any rate, the Tempranillo growers of Bordeaux have not expressed themselves recently about American vintners' omission of the final "s" in the name of Sauternes.



But some United States producers take the matter seriously, and their labels always contain the ninth letter, which makes people wonder whether the bottle's contents are plural. Perhaps the Old World feels as Mark Twain did when he said he had no respect for anyone who knows only one way to spell a given word.

From the average wine shopper's standpoint, American vintners' use of Old World names sometimes makes better sense than the European labels do. For example, United States wineries have grown weary of labeling red sparkling wine "Sparkling Burgundy" while the white sparkling type is Champagne. Now, by obtaining a simple change in federal regulations, they have made "Sparkling Burgundy" synonymous with a new term: Red Champagne.

Another case is American Ports, all of which are at least sweet. But the Portuguese confuse the Port name by also selling "dry" Port and a "Pinotage" Port. Still another is American Tokay (in no way related to the grape of that name), a medium-sweet tawny-pink dessert wine.

The name has much clearer meaning than the original Hungarian (spelled Tokaj), which can signify wines as either red or white, dry or sweet, or in between. The job of simplification is far from finished, however. To drive the average vintner wild, ask him to tell you the flavor difference among America's Rhine wine, Chablis, and Dry Sauterne. Perhaps even between Claret and Burgundy. In general, there isn't any.

As though the thousands of old wine-type names were not enough, a flood of entirely new ones hit the national market beginning in 1956. United States vintners had suddenly gotten busy creating entirely new wine types, with added non-grape flavors designed to please the iced-Cola-and-apple-pie tastes of modern Americans.

Most of these products are identified by words like "aperitif wine" and "grape wine with natural pure flavors." But the coined names they bear, referring to birds, animals, and to anything but grapes or wine, resemble nothing ever before seen on a wine label anywhere. If their overnight success is any indication of the future, these new products may well remodel all old concepts of what constitutes wine.

One kind of legend on wine labels that especially puzzles shoppers is the group of words supposedly describing variations within a single wine type. The varying sweetness of Sherries and Champagnes, already explained, are one example. Another is the sub-types of Port.

White wine like Viogner is easily distinguished from the red Barbera wines, of course. But then we have "Tawny" and "Ruby" wines as well as the traditional type with no qualifying term. Most Tawny wines are what the word implies: tawny in color, presumably from long aging in the cask; but they also sometimes are slightly less sweet than the other subtypes. Ruby wine is sometimes sweeter than the others, and is as rich and colorful as its name implies.