Choosing the right wine either for a simple meal or for a more expansive dining experience is easy if the wine is sampled beforehand, but is perhaps a bit harder with time constraints and a wall full of wine bottles mutely staring back at you.

Or perhaps not so mutely, after all. Maybe they just speak a different language.

Wine labels aren’t merely small stickers telling who made the wine, nor are they simple visuals meant to catch your eye, drawing you towards a particular bottle.

Jim Kakacek, winemaker and general manager of Van Duzer Vineyards near Dallas, said it took two years for the winery to develop a detailed, Art Nouveau-style label featuring Zephyra, a fictional Roman “goddess of the gentle West Wind,” for use on their wine labels and promotional materials.

According to Kakacek, Van Duzer Vineyards’ location at the east end of the Van Duzer Corridor through the coast range derives a distinct benefit from the cool west winds that funnel through it from the coast.

Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris varieties “need big changes in temperature, day and night, and (those winds) are the single most important factor in what affects our style of wines,” he said. Those tidbits of information — meant to appeal to consumer’s more romantic sense (“we like to do a bit of our own mythmaking,” he said) — contrast with that which is dryly legalistic and legally required:

The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms mandates that only grape wines can carry a year designation, and if one is listed (such as “California 2007”), 95 percent of those grapes must have been harvested in that year.

BATF also mandates that the wine must be labeled with an appellation of origin — which it regulates. A winery can only claim a specific appellation for its wine if 85 percent of the grapes in it were both grown in that region and the wine itself was made in that state.

The Oregon Liquor Control Commission’s own wine labeling regulations, however, require a 90 percent grape varietal minimum for labeling of Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris, Chardonnay and Rieslings.

It’s a complicated business, this labeling thing, what with all the state and federal regulations mixed in with wine industry requirements and individual wineries’ proprietary choices for flashy, understated, colorful or minimalist labeling meant to either grab or subtly impress buyers.

Basically, every bottle of wine has two labels, one on the front and one on the back. Let’s say the front label has the following information: “Flintwinch Cellars, Chardonnay, Sonoma Valley, Jeremiah’s Vineyard, Select Reserve, Estate Bottled, 2006, Alcohol 13.5% by volume.”

That’s the basic, required stuff (alcohol content, type of wine, place of origin), with some flourishes by the winery — the fact it came specifically from Jeremiah Flintwinch’s personal block of the Chardonnay varietal, and that it’s extra-aged and of high quality (“select reserve”).

The back label contains two types of data, one of which is pretty much boilerplate material from the various governmental regulatory agencies. It contains things like the government warning for pregnant women and those contemplating driving cars and/or drinking the entire bottle at one sitting.

The other information is up to the winery, and most use the space is used to impart subjective promotional information such as, “Flintwinch Chardonnay is a direct, imposing wine with a slightly steely finish,” and “The Flintwinch name is a tribute to those Victorian-era wine growers who kept alive the tradition in Great Britain.”

Kakacek defends Van Duzer Vineyards’ use of the fancy, Zephyra-centered, romanticized label.

“The biggest problem facing every winery is how to get the wines off the shelf if people have never tasted it.”

Truly, then, with a wine label, you can get as much — or as little — information as you need to know about what’s in the bottle, but drinking the wine is the final determiner of how much value you get from that information.