AmericanWinery.com

1. Any wine that isn’t fortified or sparkling. 2. In the United States, the official definition for table wine is a wine that contains a minimum of 7 percent alcohol and a maximum of 14 percent. This definition does not define quality in any way, although some connote table wine with lower-quality, inexpensive wine. That’s a mistake because many wines that simply say “Red Table Wine” or “White Table Wine” are excellent and not at all inexpensive. 3. The European Union has developed a meaning that indentifies table wine as something that doesn’t qualify as a quality wine under the various appellation rules. In most cases, this means that table wine is probably of lower quality, but some independent producers feel the appellation rules are too restrictive. They produce some very high-quality wines labeled as table wine that just don’t happen to be made exactly as the rules dictate. European synonyms for table wine include Germany’s Deutscher Tafelwein, France’s vin de table, Italy’s vino da tavola, Portugal’s vinho de mesa, and Spain’s vino de mesa.