If a wine has the right amount of tannins, it will give your tongue a great feel, and bring in the sensations of the other flavors. Once a wine starts to age, the tannins will begin to breakdown in the bottle, giving you a softer feel to the taste. Tannins are essential for the taste of wine - providing the wine has been properly aged. If you are looking for one of the more rare types of French wine, your best bet would be to use the Internet. You can find hundreds of thousands of different types of wine, including rare French wine. Rare vintage French wine can be extremely hard to find, even sometimes so online. You can always look at wine forums as well, including the many different wine websites. Most wine message boards offer a buying and selling area as well. Almost all message boards are free to join, although you should become active with your postings to gain trust on the boards. Members of the boards sell their wines to each other. Selling is done privately, which eliminates any type of transaction fee. To get the proper taste from wine however, you need to swish it around in your mouth and allow your taste buds and sense of smell to bring out the unique and fine flavors in the wine. When you have a cold however, the wine can taste very different. When tasting your wine, your sense of smell has a major impact on the taste. If you don t get Champagne that was produced in the infamous French regions, you are pretty much just buying the standard sparkling wine. You should also make sure that the bottle is spelled Champagne , with a capital C. French manufacturers are very protective of this very name, and therefore are the only ones that are authorized to use it. Keep in mind, the color and tannin content of the wine is based on how long the fermenting process takes. If the fermenting process takes a long time, the wine will generally hold more flavor and color. The remaining bulk of the grapes will go through a press, being crushed to create a tannic wine. Sometimes, this tannic wine is added with a free run wine in order to add a bit more structure to the wine blend.