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Canopy: The leaves and shoots of grapevines.
Cap: The grape skins that float to the top of fermenting red wines, forming a cap.
Capsule: Metal foil over the cork and outer top neck of the bottle.
Chaptalization: The addition of sugar to fresh grape juice to raise a wines alcohol potential.
Character: The combination of taste, bouquet, and colour in a wine.
Charm: Elegant, attractive, a very pleasant wine.
Chewy: Full bodied, you could almost chew it.
Clarify: The wine making operation which removes lees, dead yeast cells and fragments of grape skins, stems, seeds and pulp, from grape juice or new wine.
Classic: Typical of grape variety or region.
Clean: Describes a refreshing wine without any foreign or off character on the palate. A requirement for a quality wine. No unpleasant tastes, smells fresh.
Clone: A sub group within a variety of genetically identical plants propagated from a single vine to perpetuate selected or special characteristics.
Closed: No obvious tastes or smell.
Cloudy: Hazed, protein, whether stored too cold or badly made.
Cloying: Over sweet, sickly.
CO2: Chemical formula for carbon dioxide. It is naturally produced in wine during fermentation when sugar is converted into almost equal parts of alcohol and CO2. CO2 normally escapes as gas. If the gas is prevented from escaping, the wine becomes sparkling.
Coarse: Rough.
Cold Stabilization: A technique of chilling wines before bottling to cause the precipitation of harmless tartrate crystals.
Complete: All the right elements are there in the correct balance, correct levels.
Complexity: The term used when a wine has multiple flavour and aroma characteristics.
Cooked: Smell and taste of overheated grape juice. See burnt.
Cooperage: The general term used to designate containers where wine is stored and aged. These can be oak casks and stainless steel aging tanks.
Corked or Corky: An off characteristic in wines due to imperfect corks. Often caused by the chemical compound trichloroanisole or TCA, corkiness is believed to come from fungi that are not detectable on dry corks, or by a cork processed with chlorine. The faulty cork imparts a musty, unpleasant taste and smell to the wine.
Correct: Like complete but less so.
Creamy:Texture and taste found in some white wines.
Crisp: A clean wine with good acidity showing on the finish, yielding a fresh and positive aftertaste.
Cross: A vine bred by crossing two plants of the same species with different genetic constituents.
Crush: The grape harvest or vintage measured in tonnes.
Cuvee: French for a large vat or tank in which wines are fermented or blended as in champagne. Also a blend made for a special purpose.
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