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Wine and champagne labels can be frightening to new or inexperienced wine drinkers. How to to decipher the foreign symbols, words and numbers can be confusing without some idea of what everything is supposed to mean!

Novices tend to look for simple labels with pretty pictures and many newer wineries are actually making labels that appeal to the label-challenged. While this is probably a good thing, so is learning how to understand the information on the more traditional labels.

The label tells you everything you need to know about the wine inside the bottle -- and with a little practice it really isn't that hard. These sites will help you to learn more about what the labels mean if you need the tutoring and will showcase some unusual labels for those already label literate...

Professional Friends of Wine - Understanding Wine Labels - This is the definitive text on how to read wine labels with pages sorted into Basics, Appellation Labels, Generic Labels, plus links to a good selection of other sites that cover the topic.

Wine Buyer Guide - Labels - This site sells wines online and they have some excellent resources to help you decipher exactly what it is you are thinking about buying. The section on French, Italian and American labels is extremely easy to understand and should make label reading a bit less mysterious.

Understanding Wine Labels - This is the Wine for Dummies version of how to read a wine label. Like most of the resources in this series, it manages to give a simple explanation of the whole subject.

Decoding German Wine Labels - The Wine Guy has the best tutorial for this particular topic with a step by step guide to not only explaining what the stuff you see on the label stands for, but what it means in terms of dry, semi dry or sweet wines. It may take a couple of refreshers, but print it out and try it on a few bottles...

Australian Wine Labels Gallery - A featured label every month, galleries collected over 30 years and links to other collectors' sites that include international wine labels from will make your visit here just the first. Bookmark it...you'll be back.

The Wine Labels World - These collectors from Belgium have assembled an amazing collection of labels for you to see and grouped them by themes such as flowers, windows, Bordeaux... The text explanations are mainly about Champagne. They are very simple and easy to understand . This site should be on your list if you are a wine label collector or if you need some really fundamental pointers on reading labels. They have made the site available in six languages.

200 Years of Wines of the World - Occassionally the contents of a site are so extremely good that they overwhelm poor design. This is the case here. The webmaster is a wine label collector who has done a great job of providing an astounding array of labels. The navigation and layout might not be impressive, but in this case, it's worth a visit anyway. There are labels from countries that you'd think never produced a bottle of wine to put a label on.

Guide to Bottle Sizes - Well, no, it isn't exactly labels, but this seemed like a good place for this resource. It lists the names for the different bottle sizes. If someone mentions a Nebuchadnezzar or Jeroboam, you'll know what they're talking about.

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