In the last two weeks I have written the descriptions for more than 400 different wines. My brain aches. I have run out of adjectives and I look about as fresh as my rather dog-eared thesaurus.

The biggest problem I find with being so heavily immersed in a project like this is that you start to lose sight of the basics and I have just been given a bit of a ticking off for using wine speak and not explaining what it means.

It’s easy when you spend your life tasting, drinking, talking and reading about the stuff to forget that there are all sorts of words and phrases dotted around on wine lists, back labels and websites that are supposed to help us but, in fact, only serve to muddy the waters.

So, this week I am giving you my quick guide to commonly used wine terms that will, hopefully, help you make better sense of what you are reading.

‘A wine of good length’ and ‘a long finish’ are both phrases we wine writers use to suggest the period of time that the flavour of the wine stays on your palate. The simple rule is that the more enduring the taste, the better the quality of the wine.

Balance is a word that crops up all the time. I found it over 150 times in my humungous document. Again, it’s a word we use as an indicator of quality. If a wine is ‘well-balanced’ it means that the individual components are all complementary. This would include the acidity, tannins and levels of alcohol. If any of these are overpowering then the wine is unbalanced. Where balance is over used we replace it with ‘harmonious’.

It took me quite a while to learn the subtle difference between ‘aroma’ and ‘bouquet’. The tendency is to use the former for fresher, simpler wines, while ‘bouquet' is reserved for those that have more going on and have specific smells that can be associated with certain winemaking techniques. Of course, the copywriter is entirely at liberty to interchange these words at their leisure, so don’t be reading too much into it!

Evolved is another firm favourite. As you might expect it’s typically used with wines that have already spent some time maturing in a bottle. You might read, ‘more evolved flavours’ and you would expect that the fresh, youthful aromas have taken on a more exotic edge.

I’m in love with the term ‘oak influence’ and the person who first thought of it was a real smarty-pants. Ageing or fermenting — turning grape juice to wine — in oak barrels is exceedingly expensive and for many value wines it’s inconceivable that the juice or wine will ever have spent time in a 600 Euro 225-litre barrel. So, a winemaker can use other techniques to impart oak qualities without actual going the whole hog. They can use oak chips which are usually added to the wine during fermentation. Chips can be large or small, French or American oak, and toasted to the winemaker’s requirements. An alternative is to use oak staves which work in much the same way as chips but are obviously bigger.

Still, a wine-producer who has used full oak barrels isn’t going to use a phrase like ‘oak influence’; that’s reserved for those wines that have been chipped or staved.

Last, but by no means least in this quick guide, is body. When you drink some wines your mouth seems to fill completely and generously with fruit and they feel, literally, heavy. That’s what we call a full-bodied wine. There is a direct link between alcoholic strength and the body of a wine, so be on your guard for any full-bodied wines with a moderate 12 per cent abv. The obvious opposite of full-bodied is light-bodied.

So, now that you are fully equipped with the vocabulary, there should be no stopping you sounding like an absolute wine pro and, if you don’t want to use them out loud, I’m hoping you will understand better the description in front of you.

Click here for The Oxford Times Wine Club offers.