(PD) - Fine wine is a romantic beverage that, like cheese, comes from a mundane liquid (grape juice for wine, milk for cheese) and is transformed by fermentation into a sublime, hand-tended product that actually ages and improves, then fades and deteriorates.

Sure, some (usually low-priced) wines are less romantic than that. Some are almost literally manufactured with the use of giant harvesting and manipulating machines, and automation techniques that would be right at home in a multinational food giant that homogenizes flavors by computer analysis.

One aspect of all wine that almost never rears its head in public is that they all may be analyzed for their chemical constituents. Winemakers do it all the time to determine exactly what’s in each wine.

All wines contain acid levels between about 4 grams per liter and 8 grams per liter — and the more acid, the tarter the wine will be. Also related to this is the pH of the wine — the higher it is, the softer and sweeter the wine will seem.

You would think that wineries would like to inform their customers of some of each wine’s technical details, since knowing the basic facts of a wine would help buyers make the right purchasing decisions.

However, almost no wineries ever tell consumers much about their wines — most for fear they will remove some of the romance and mystique. Which is very sad, when you think about it.

I have often been asked why a wine that a consumer bought was so unlike what he or she expected. One e-mailer not long ago said she had gotten a chardonnay that tasted sweet, and had no idea the wine would be like that.

Many Riesling producers now use the International Riesling Foundation’s (IRF) sweetness scale on their back labels, one that I created for the IRF a few years ago.

It is supported by technical guidelines, which are on the IRF web site (www.DrinkRiesling.com), but simply calls for wineries to put an arrow on the scale pointing to whether the wine is dry or indicate its perceived sweetness level.

Moreover, fine wine is a product of its vineyard (the source of fruit) as well as the clonal material grown in that vineyard and what sort of rootstock was chosen for the vines.