Learning to taste wine is a wonderful thing! Having tasted a few wines in my day, I can say that tasting a new bottle of wine, for me, is an event! While I do not have the educated palate of a sommelier, I just love tasting new and exciting wines!
For the beginner, tasting wine can be a little intimidating. It is easy to fall into the trap of buying a bottle because the label looks sexy. That is how my wife used to buy bottles of wine and I can assure you, whatever is printed on the label or the exquisite crafting of the bottle, has nothing to do with what is inside. One of the best ways to experience real fine wines is with our wine of the month club.
Part of the reason for this blog is to help beginners on their journey of wine discovery. To that end, I have created what I like to call…
The 5 S’s of Wine!!
When I first started tasting different wines, I read a lot on how to taste wine. These tips, however, always came from someone who already knew some intricate details of the experience and they spoke in terms that I did not understand. For example, folks who are studying for the Master Sommelier have to go out and taste things that people would normally never think of tasting. Just know that there are people who lick grass, chew on gravel, and gnaw on concrete in order to give accurate flavor profiles of wines. I decided I did not want to do that. I wanted to get information from a place that would give me lay terms of wine tasting. Eventually, I may resort to licking concrete or chewing on hay, but not right now.
Start Out Very Easy
For the beginner, I developed this 5 step process that I still use to this day when I taste a wine for the first time. When you taste wine, it helps to exercise your mind as well as your palate. Studies have shown that tasting wine has a direct correlation to improvements in cognitive abilities as well. This is an all-around win!
1. See
The journey starts when you take a look at your bottle. The most obvious thing is the color inside. Can you see through it? Can you see anything while it is inside the bottle still? Are you just attempting to look through murky depths and being unsuccessful at seeing anything? Some people have preferences for their wines and it normally boils down to red or white. But then, we open that bottle and a few amazing things happen.
When you first open that bottle, you will get your first scents of the contents of the bottle. It may give you an overwhelming sensation to take a drink. Straight from the bottle! It may make you want to dump the contents in the sink and throw the bottle in the trash right away. Either way, resist whatever urge you get, and have a wine glass ready. To get a good taste, I recommend pouring yourself about 3 to 4 ounces of the wine in a glass with a pretty large rim.
Now that you have some wine in the glass, take a look at the color. Study the intensity. It is not as simple as red and white. As you look further into that red wine, are there any different hues? Can you see any sort of pink or orange? Are there any variations of a plum color? Can you not see through the wine, or is it completely transparent? I suggest having a white towel or paper towel handy. Have the towel on a counter or table and tilt your glass over the towel. This will also give you a truer sense of the colors that are present. It is kind of like setting white balance on a camera (for all my photography people out there!) Really nailing down the color, intensity and other characteristics can help you get a sense of what’s to come.
2. Swirl
Time to start the magic! Go ahead and give your glass a little swirl. You want the wine to swirl all around the insides of the glass. The reason for this is to allow the wine to ‘open up’. This allows the wine to come into contact with oxygen and that allows many more complexities in the wine to make themselves more apparent. Swirling can raise the intensity in most young wines as well as aged beauties. On another note, when done properly, it will wow and amaze those around you.
After you get a good swirl, you want to pay attention to a few things. Observe how fast the wine comes to rest after you swirl it. Check to see if the wine sticks to the insides of the glass, or if it runs down the sides to the bottom rather quickly.
This phenomenon is often referred to as ‘tears’ or ‘legs’. Some people think that wine legs are related to the quality, sweetness or viscosity of the wine. However, they are indicative of the alcoholic content. The legs or tears are caused by the interplay between adhesion, evaporation and surface tension of water and alcohol. The scientific term for this is the Gibbs-Marangoni effect. To sum it all up, after you swirl your glass of wine, if the tears return to the bottom of the glass slowly, expect a little more acidity from the wine.
3. Sniff/Smell
This is where having a wine glass with a pretty big rim comes into play. Shove your nose into the glass! Don’t be scared! It may seem silly at first, but this is an intricate step! You may need to swirl your wine a little more to coax all the wonderful aromas and subtle hints out of a wine in its totality. Being that we are humans and we all interpret our senses differently, don’t think of this process as right or wrong. Wine scents can run the gamut of just about everything! Cherries, blackberries, plums, or smells of cheese and vanilla are just a few scents that can present themselves! Everything from leather to tobacco to grass may be present. This is the part where you allow your imagination to run wild!
When I first smell a wine, I try to identify what jumps out at me first. What is the first major smell that I get? Then I swirl it around a few more times and sniff again. I look for any underlying scents that I can identify. Keep in mind however, there is no shame in not being able to identify something. I have used descriptors like ‘something dank’, and the ‘smell of outside’ as descriptors for myself. Chewing on gravel and licking grass may come in handy here, but as I have said…I am not there yet…
Let me give you an example. I purchased this 2017 Pinot Noir from Oregon. First of all, I never knew that Oregon was a major producer of wines in America! After I got over that shock and sniffed the wine, the smell of cherry and blackberry jumped out at me immediately. I made another couple of swirls and smelled again. This time, I picked up the smell of leather and some sort of flowers. Even though I could not identify the flowers, I could smell them. I was completely blown away!
4. Sip
Think of this process as piecing together a beautiful puzzle. You have a nice chunk of the puzzle in place and the picture is beginning to come together. Here is where you finally sip the wine. It may seem like it has taken us a while to get here, but it will all be worth it in this step.
Take a generous gulp of the wine and hold it in your mouth. Take your time and feel all the sensations that this wine gives you! Swish it through your entire mouth. Allow it to hit the back of your tongue, the inside of your cheeks, under your tongue…everywhere! You may have seen a seasoned pro take a taste of wine and noticed the off-putting and frankly disgusting sounds he or she might make.
There is a reason for this and it is to allow the wine to hit all the parts of their mouth. They are assessing sweetness, bitterness, and tannins. They may even suck in some more air as they are swishing. This allows further aeration on the palate and helps some of the volatile components to be sensed by the olfactory system, allowing them to tap even further into the characteristics of the wine.
In some settings, it is preferable to spit out the wine as opposed to swallowing it. This normally happens when someone is tasting several wines in one sitting. It is not a good look to be tipsy at a wine tasting!
If you are just tasting a single bottle or two, it is perfectly normal to swallow the taste gulp. Then pour yourself another glass!
5. Savor
Here is the final piece of the puzzle. Take a moment to enjoy the after-effects of the wine. How long does it give that tingle in your mouth? Are there any other fleeting flavors that you get as the sensation of the wine dissipates? Is there any acidic burning? If so, how long does that last? Quick tip…after you swallow that gulp, take a deep breath and exhale through your nose. You will feel that acidity. This is the time to think about the whole experience. Did the wine’s color and smell equal to the taste? Was the wine a balance of acidity and sweetness? Do you want to take another drink or never have this taste in your mouth again?
Final Thoughts
How does that puzzle look? If you have done this process, you should have a much clearer picture of the wine in your head. There is nothing set in stone about how a wine should taste and how it should affect you. The beautiful thing about wine tasting is that it is all up to you. Even if you cannot identify all the smells and flavors, this should have been an amazing journey. These steps should take no longer than 2 or 3 minutes, but you will be surprised at what you can pull out of wine when you take your time and enjoy it. My wife often jokes me because I normally close my eyes and bask in the glorious lingering effects of the wine after I swallow it. She asks if I need a cigarette. I think haha. And not in an actual laughing way.
I hope that you enjoy these basics of an incredible hobby. Taste wine. Develop your own ideas of what the wine reminds you of. Decide on whether you will get the wine again. It is also a great idea to keep a journal of wines that you have tasted and what you think of them. You can do this with a digital app like Vivino, or you can keep a good old paper journal. If you decide on digital, you can follow other people on Vivino and see what wines they rate and how they rate them. You can search for Courcy Williams if you would like to follow me on my journey and take a peek at some of my wines.
Have fun with this journey and don’t take it too seriously. If you are studying to become a Master Sommelier, don’t worry. There are plenty of rocks and grass for you to taste. For the regular person, just get out there and taste wines!
The perfect way to do that is to have wines shipped to your house! You can avoid the long, confusing aisles in the grocery stores and avoid the cheaply, overproduced drinks that they call wines. Most of the time, grocery stores carry sweetened fruit punches. Learn how you can experience fine wines from the Napa and Sonoma Valley area so you can experience what real wines are really like.
Response Magic