Make That Wine - Reading Test Answers

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Australia is a nation of beer drinkers. Actually, make that wine. Yes, wine has now just about supplanted beer as the alcoholic drink of choice, probably because of the extensive range of choices available and the rich culture behind them.

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Wine is the product of the fermentation of grape juice, in which yeast (a fungus) consumes the natural sugars within, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide as waste. Yeast grows naturally on many varieties of grapes, often visible as a white powder, and causing fermentation directly on the plant.

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Thus, the discovery of wine-making was inevitable at some stage in human history. The evidence shows that this was at least 8,000 years ago in the Near East.

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which results in blended wines. The latter process is often done when wine-makers, and the people who drink their product, want a consistent taste, year after year. Far from being looked down upon, it often results in some of the world’s most expensive bottles, such as the Cote Rotie wines in France.

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Most people do not know that the colour of wine is not due to the grapes used (whose skins are either green or purple), but to the wine-making process itself. All grape juice is clear. Red wines are produced by leaving the grape skin in contact with the juice during fermentation; white wines by not doing so.

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Chardonnay grapes remain one of the most widely planted, producing an array of white wines, rivaling the cabernet sauvignon grape, a key ingredient in the world’s most widely recognised, and similarly named, red wines.

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When one grape species is used, or is predominant, the wine produced is called varietal, as opposed to mixing the juices of various identified grapes,

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Traditional wines made in these places carry trademarks, respected by serious wine drinkers. However, an example of the blurred lines is the term ‘champagne’.

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Finally, we come to the vinification method as a means of classification. One example is, in fact, champagne, known as a ‘sparkling’ wine.

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Another variation is to stop the fermentation before all the natural sugars are consumed, creating dessert wines, ranging from slight to extreme sweetness.

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Of course, the appreciation and assessment of wine is an inexact science, meaning that the significance of a particular vintage often promotes much speculation and disagreement.

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This leads to the rich and varied world of wine assessment, and its descriptive terminology.

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To this day, the biggest drinkers of wine remain the Mediterranean countries, with France leading the way.