Quality & Style Labelling Terms

Quality & Style Labelling Terms

Inside a country's GI system, individual regions often add their own extra layer of quality classification on top of the basic PDO rules — a hierarchy within the hierarchy. Recognising these terms is essential for WSET Level 2, because they tell you a great deal about a wine's price, style, and expected quality before you ever taste it.

Burgundy: Village, Premier Cru, Grand Cru

Burgundy's AOC system is built as a pyramid of increasingly precise geography. At the base sits regional AOC wine (labelled simply "Bourgogne"), sourced from anywhere in the wider region. Above that sit village AOCs, named after a specific commune (e.g., Chablis, Gevrey-Chambertin, Meursault) where all the grapes must be grown. Above the village level sit Premier Cru vineyards — individually named, higher-quality single vineyards within a village, shown on the label as the village name plus "1er Cru" and often the vineyard name. At the very top sit Grand Cru vineyards — the most celebrated individual sites in Burgundy, prestigious enough that the label drops the village name entirely and shows only the vineyard name itself (e.g., Chambertin, Montrachet). The narrower the geography named on the label, the higher the wine typically sits in Burgundy's quality pyramid.

Bordeaux: Regional Rules and Chateau Classifications

Bordeaux layers quality information two different ways. First, geographically: basic Bordeaux AOC covers the whole region, while Bordeaux Supérieur applies stricter rules — lower permitted yields and a higher minimum alcohol level — to wine from the same broad area, and named sub-regions (Médoc, Margaux, Saint-Émilion, and others) apply their own tighter local rules again. Second, Bordeaux uses historic classifications of individual producers (chateaux), independent of the AOC system itself. Cru Bourgeois is an official classification of well-regarded Médoc chateaux sitting just below the most famous names. Grand Cru Classé refers to a chateau's inclusion in one of Bordeaux's formal historic classifications (such as the 1855 Classification of the Médoc), the highest recognition a Bordeaux producer can carry on its label.

Alsace Grand Cru

Alsace applies a single top tier directly to its best vineyard sites: Alsace Grand Cru, a legally defined list of around 51 individual vineyards recognised as Alsace's finest terroir. Wines labelled Alsace Grand Cru must, in almost all cases, be made from a single one of Alsace's four "noble" grape varieties (Riesling, Gewurztraminer, Pinot Gris, or Muscat) and meet stricter yield and ripeness rules than standard Alsace AOC wine.

Comparing the Hierarchies

Although the vocabulary differs by country, the underlying logic is the same everywhere: a narrower, more precisely defined piece of land carries a higher classification and, generally, a higher price.

Reading a label, then, is really an exercise in decoding geography: the more specific the named place, the more tightly controlled the wine's origin, yield, and (usually) quality.

Germany's Prädikat Ladder

Within Prädikatswein, Germany grades wine by how ripe the grapes were at harvest, measured as must weight (sugar level) at picking. The six Prädikat levels, from least to most ripe, are:

1. Kabinett — the lightest, earliest-picked level; typically light-bodied, crisp, and low in alcohol.
2. Spätlese — "late harvest"; riper grapes, more concentrated flavour, fuller body.
3. Auslese — "selected harvest"; from specially selected, extra-ripe bunches, often with a touch of noble rot.
4. Beerenauslese (BA) — "selected berry harvest"; individually selected, botrytis-affected berries; intensely sweet.
5. Eiswein — grapes reach the same minimum ripeness as BA but are left on the vine and picked and pressed while frozen, concentrating sugar and acid further; extremely sweet with searingly high acidity.
6. Trockenbeerenauslese (TBA) — the ripest, rarest level; individually selected, shrivelled, botrytis-affected berries; the sweetest and most expensive Prädikat wines.

Two additional style terms can appear alongside these ripeness levels: Trocken ("dry") and Halbtrocken ("off-dry"/medium-dry) show that a wine — even one labelled Kabinett or Spätlese — has actually been fermented out to a dry or medium-dry finish rather than left sweet, since the Prädikat scale measures grape ripeness at harvest, not the final sweetness in the glass.

Old Vine and Late-Harvest Terms

Old Vine (or Vieilles Vignes in French) is a marketing term, not a legally defined or regulated classification in most countries; it implies grapes from older, lower-yielding vines believed to give more concentrated fruit, but there is no minimum vine age a producer must meet to use it. Late harvest (or Vendanges Tardives in Alsace, where it is an official, regulated designation) describes grapes deliberately left on the vine past normal picking time to build extra sugar, producing riper, fuller, often sweeter wine. Many late-harvest wines gain further concentration from botrytis (noble rot), a beneficial fungus that shrivels ripe grapes and concentrates their sugar and acid while adding distinctive honeyed, marmalade aromas — seen in Sauternes, Tokaji Aszú, and German BA/TBA wines. Icewine/Eiswein achieves a similar concentration through natural winter freezing rather than fungus. Spain applies its own ripeness-and-ageing ladder at the DO/DOCa level — Joven (young, little or no oak ageing), Crianza, Reserva, and Gran Reserva — where each step up requires longer minimum ageing in oak and bottle before release, covered fully alongside Tempranillo and Rioja in Chapter 7.