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Glite Dictionary
table wine

table wine

1 2.9
A wine people drink with a meal
  • noun
  • /ˈteɪbəl waɪn/
  • US
translation icon : vino de mesa
  • And that's from the very, very high end all the way through to an incredible value table wine with with a similar sensory, which is slightly sweeter.
  • dry table wine
  • red table wine
  • white table wine

Examples

  • - You mean table wine.

    The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1970)

  • In a crowded little house filled with nine children, not to mention an occasional grandparent or a miscreant uncle sleeping off a drunk on the couch, her stories were told in the dining room over table wine and Salem cigarettes, and, thinking about her now, she appeared as exotic then as Scheherazade, and Brooklyn was the setting of her Arabian nights.

    Academic text (1995)

  • During dinner, we enjoyed a lovely table wine that complemented the meal nicely.

  • Many restaurants offer a selection of table wines to pair with their dishes.

  • The wine list featured several affordable table wines to suit every palate.

Antonyms

fortified wine
1 4.8

A wine with extra alcohol added, like brandy

How Alcoholic

table wine
  • US
1 2.9

Surface Forms

table wine singular
table wines plural

Morphology

table + wine

The meaning 'wine served with meals / ordinary wine' is directly and compositionally derived from 'table' (meals/board) + 'wine', so a B1 learner who knows both words can infer the basic sense. The exact legal/alcohol threshold is a technical detail, but the core idea of wine for the table is cross-linguistically common (e.g., French vin de table, Spanish vino de mesa), supporting transparency.

Etymology

Table wine may come from the simple idea of wine kept on the dinner table to drink with a meal. It was plain, everyday wine, not a special or very strong drink, so today table wine means wine 'served with meals' or 'everyday' wine that is 'not strong'.