Growing wine

Drinking wine and growing it are two vocabularies, and this is the second one. German wine law has left a set of words on every label that mean something exact rather than something flattering: die Spätlese and die Auslese are Prädikate, and they describe how ripe the fruit was when it was picked, not how good the wine turned out. Die Lage is a named piece of hillside and appears on the label as a place name. And der Ausbau — literally the building-out — is everything done to the wine after fermentation, which is where most of the difference is made.