Tasting wine
A lot of words are written and spoken about wine tasting. And in my opinion, not all of them are particularly wise or well chosen. After all, wine tasting is a complex and highly subjective area.
However, if you really want to ‘appreciate’ wine, then there are a few basic guidelines which will help you navigate your way through.
Moreover, tasting and analysing in a systematic way can really add to your pleasure and understanding of a wine. In particular, being able to assess a wine’s quality can tell you whether it is any good, how typical it is and whether it represents decent value for money and whether it is ready to drink. So it can be very useful. And it’s good fun too, if you don’t take it too seriously.
In which case, here’s how the professionals go about tasting wine.
Sight
You can tell a lot about wine just by looking at it. For the best results, tilt your glass of wine at an angle and hold it in front of a bright white background. What colours do you see in the wine?
With a white wine, the colours vary from a pale yellow-green to a much deeper golden brown. In red wines, the variation is from a deep purple-ruby hue to a pale brick red colour. So there is quite a spectrum.
The important thing about colour and depth is that wines change colour as they age. Essentially, over time white wines gain colour and red wines lose it. So if you a see a pale red wine, it is likely to be older while a pale white wine is likely to be younger.
Also, some grape varieties show more colour and others less. In white wines Muscadet and young Riesling tend to be paler, while Chardonnay tends to be deeper. In red wines, Cabernet Sauvignon has a lot more depth of colour than Pinot Noir. So just by looking at the colour of a wine, you can start to gather some clues about what it is likely to be and whether it is true to its ‘type’.
Smell
OK, the next thing you need to do is start swirling the glass around in your hand –without ruining your carpet or hurling wine over someone else’s shirt. So you might want to practise this in private in case you get a bit over-exuberant.
The point of this is to release the more volatile compounds in the wine, which react with oxygen to give the aromas that Jilly Goolden used to go on about ad nauseam. You remember the type of thing – ‘juniper berries, quince, ginger and Castrol GTX.’ (OK, I made that last one up.)
Then you put your proboscis into the glass and take a good long sniff. The chances are that we will all smell something slightly different because of the way our olfactory systems are designed. But our sense of smell is by far the most powerful and important of all. One reason for this is because the average person can detect over 2,000 different scents. Moreover, wine has over 200 aromas which are discernible to the human nose.
However, don’t just stop at one sniff. Take two more good long sniffs and see if you can describe what it is that you smell. This is called nosing the wine. And it is also very important because it will tell you whether the wine is ‘off’ or ‘faulty’. I’ll come onto this later – and what to do about it if you are in a restaurant. In particular, if the wine smells stale or sherry-like it means that the wine is partly oxidised – which is not usually a good sign (unless, it is actually sherry!). And if it smells of nail varnish, it is completely oxidised. However, if it smells of damp socks, wet cardboard, mould or church hymn books then it probably means the wine is ‘corked’.
If it doesn’t smell of any of these things, it means the wine is in good condition and perfectly alright. So what are you noticing when nosing the wine? Does it smell of butter, vanilla, gooseberries, limes, apples or flowers. All of these aromas can be found in different wines and all you need to do is to try and describe what you are smelling.
However, don’t be put off if someone else smells something in a wine that you don’t. I’ve sat in between two Masters of Wine who came up with two entirely different descriptions of the same wine. That’s partly because people’s olfactory systems are different and partly because people have different ways of describing the same smell. One person’s gooseberry could be another person’s green pepper. What is important is that you begin to build up your own vocabulary of describing what’s in your glass.
With practice, you’ll begin to notice that certain grape varieties do have characteristic aromas. For instance, Sauvignon Blanc tends to have gooseberries and green pepper notes. Pinot Noir has aromas of strawberries and raspberries and so on.
Taste
You may be surprised to know that there are only five things that you can taste with your mouth. These are sweetness, saltiness, bitterness, sourness and ‘Umami’ which is a sort of savoury flavour. So the notion that your mouth is where the tasting action goes on is simply incorrect.
If you don’t believe me, try tasting a wine whilst pinching your nose. Then try it again as normal and you’ll notice that, second time around, you get much more flavour. That’s because olfactory bulb which registers aromas and flavours is much more sensitive than the tongue. It is also positioned at the top of the nose and so receives vapour molecules through the nose when smelling, but also through the rear nasal passage when drinking.
Nevertheless, what you notice in your mouth is very important when tasting wine. For instance, you’ll sense that the wine is either sweet, dry or somewhere in between.
You’ll need to see if the fruit flavours you picked up when nosing the wine are the same when you taste it. Sometimes, they can be different or more numerous. Then you will want to think about the acidity in the wine. For instance is it tart and sharp or a little bit lacking in freshness. If it’s the latter, the wine could be what wine professionals call ‘flabby’.
If it’s a white wine, there usually isn’t any tannin in the wine so there’s no need to look for it. But if it is a red wine, then tannin is a very important factor when it comes to wine tasting. (Tannins are difficult to describe, but the effect in wine is rather like stewed tea. Too much and it tastes tough and astringent. Too little and a wine may lack ‘structure’).
Next, you need to look at whether the wine seems full-bodied and big or light and delicate. A German Mosel will be light and delicate while a Californian Chardonnay will tend to be much bigger and bolder. So the ‘body’ of the wine is another clue to what it might be, its quality and its typicity.
Then you need to put all these different components together to think about whether the wine is balanced and complex or disjointed and simple. Do all the various bits of fruit, acidity, tannin and ‘body’ seem to work in harmony or do they seem at odds with each other. If it’s the latter, I’m afraid it isn’t a good sign.
Lastly, how long do the wine’s flavours linger on your palate. If the flavour simply disappears almost as soon as the wine does down your throat then the wine has a short ‘finish’. However, if you can still taste the wine thirty or sixty seconds later (or even longer), that is the sign of a good wine. Moreover the longer the aftertaste is, the longer (and better) the length and the quality of the wine.
What to do next?
If you’re really interested in wine tasting, there are various things that you could do:
Practice your tasting technique at home whenever you open a bottle of wine.
Enrol on a wine course. There’s probably no better way to learn.
Go to a wine tasting. It’s great practice, you taste lots of different wines and can compare notes with other people.
Buy a book. Michael Broadbent’s ‘Pocket Guide To Winetasting’ is considered one of the classics. But also most wine books and wine guides have a section on how to taste wine. | |
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