Opinion | Elegant, lighter-bodied shiraz comes to the fore in Australia

Anybody who brings up weight in the post-holiday months probably deserves a sack of coal next Christmas. Our culture's fixation with bodies is such that we tend to apply body-related analogies even to things for which they're poorly suited.

For example, a so called full-bodied wine is not literally any larger or heavier than a light-bodied one. It's not even necessarily denser, given alcohol is only 80 per cent as dense as water, and full-bodied wines tend to pack the alcohol in spades, sometimes hitting 16 or 17 per cent.

So is that it? Is body just a matter of booze? Not necessarily: some "plumpness" comes from a viscous form of alcohol called glycerol (aka glycerin, an ingredient in many hand soaps, but please don't try drinking one).

Other wines are low in alcohol but high in sugar, making them feel thicker in the mouth just as honey feels thicker than apple juice. The final factor is called "total dry extract," which seems an inappropriately dry term for the roughly 20 grams of different dissolved solids in every bottle that make a wine such as Lafite sublime and one like Yellow Tail decidedly ordinary.

Thus what "body" actually describes is wine's viscosity; that is, internal friction or thickness (we won't comment on the resultant implications of being called a full-bodied person).