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How to taste - Wine appeals to all your senses: sight, smell, taste and the intellect. Each glass is a lesson in history, geography, agriculture, botany and more. The more wines you try, the more you'll develop your palate . And how you try it makes all the difference.
The idea behind wine is as simple as this: slow down, relax and take the time to think about what you're drinking. Do it with all your senses even the hearing: "popping the cork and the bursting of sparkling wine bubbles and cheers".
Sight - First step is to fill your glass until it's about a third full.Tilt it slightly against a white background, or hold it up to the light. Natural daylight is the best. Neon, quarts, candles, colored walls, furniture and even what we're wearing, will alter the original color of the wine.
We look for clarity and color. All wine should be bright and clean and free of particular sediments.
White wines have a range of colors from water white to deep golden depending on sugar content and maturity. Red wines range from dense purple to pale cherry depending on grape variety and age. (Incidentally, white wines gain color with age, as opposed to reds, which lose color and fade.)
Now swirl the wine in the glass and let it settle.
Hold the glass up to the light and look for the transparent wetness left on the sides of the glass.
This will fall back to the surface in "tears" or "legs".
This effect can tell you the alcoholic strength of the wine or it’s viscosity if you wish.
Thicker "legs" and a slow motion toward the bottom of the glass indicate a higher alcohol content
Sniff - Now give it a swirl, getting a good motion going. This releases all the wine's aromas. Jam your nose right into the glass and inhale slowly. Your first impressions are the most vivid. Your nose will tell you seventy-five percent of what you want to know about the wine,
An experienced taster will be able to tell a lot from just inhaling, he can distinguish 5,000 smells but the palate only registers four taste sensations: sweet, salt, sour and bitter.
First look for faults: off odors, vinegary scents or oxidation?
Once you have established that the bouquet is clean, assess its quality.
Most people find it difficult to describe what they smell in a wine, but when they hear a description that approximates their own experience they will agree upon it.
Enologist Ann Noble of the University of California at Davis developed an aroma wheel to help describe a whole range of smells found in wine, both good and bad.
The UC Davis Aroma Wheel, consists of three concentric circles.The smallest contains the most general terms to describe a wine's bouquet.The second circle becomes more specific, qualifying the first.The outer circle refines the perception down to a specific aroma description. |
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Taste - There is not one taste but three: the initial taste as the wine hits your palate, the secondary taste when the wine warms up in the mouth and the aftertaste once you have swallowed it.
Now pour the wine into the glass and gently swirl the wine around in the glass, while holding it by the stem.
Start sniffing the wine by getting your nose into the glass as close as possible to the wine. This is why they call this part of tasting "the nose". Here you search for fruit flavors, oak, spicy or earthy overtones and endless aromas that come to mind.
A mouth-feel wheel is a
sensory wheel that describes the astringent and other mouth-feel sensations of red wine. This is a vocabulary developed by a relatively small number of wine-tasters at the Department of Horticulture, Viticulture and Oenology, University of
Adelaide, Waite Campus,
PMB 1, Glen Osmond, SA 5064, Australia.
The Tongue - Different areas of the tongue are more sensitive to one taste sensation than another. Sweetness at the tip, saltiness a little farther back and sourness or acidity at the sides, with bitterness sensed at the very back.
Acidity - Makes the wine taste crisp and fresh. Too much and it will taste unpleasantly sharp and bitter. Not enough it will taste flabby.
Alcohol - The higher the level of alcohol gets, the rounder the wine feels in the mouth.
If it's out of balance with the fruit and tannin and so on, then it will feel hot.
We cannot actually smell alcohol we are aware of its presence as a "hot" sensation in the nose and down the throat.
Sweetness - This is affected by the amount of sugar in the wine.
Sweetness needs to be balanced by acidity or the wine is too sugary and flabby, and will not refresh the palate..
Tannin - Tannin creates that furry, drying feeling that you get in the mouth after a swig of a very young red. Tannin helps with the weight of a wine and soften with age.
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