Jancis Robinson

Estate Wine

Appears in
Oxford Companion to Wine
Oxford Companion to Wine

By Jancis Robinson

Published 2006

  • About

estate wine, term in common parlance, but not in federal law, in the US that suggests loosely that the wine came entirely from grapes farmed on the winery’s own property. ‘Estate wine’ may be casually construed conversationally to be exactly synonymous with estate bottled, which has legal status, but technically it is not.

In South Africa ‘estate wine’ is a specific term for a wine that was grown, made, and bottled on a single geographical unit registered with the Wine and Spirit Board. Many German producers refer to their most basic bottling of Riesling as their Estate Riesling, Gutsriesling in German.