What is wine tasting all about? The main purpose of wine tasting is to judge the quality of a wine.
Every year, leading wine magazines rate newly-released wines with the help of wine critics, who determine the quality of the wines and give each of them a score that can be used by consumers as a reference for purchasing.
Wine tasting is also the job of a sommelier of a high-end restaurant, who tastes a variety of wines either on wine fairs or on wine merchants’ recommendation, determining the quality based on their knowledge. Then based on the quality and the price, the sommelier decides if the wine is good value for money, and whether or not to include it in the restaurant’s wine list.
Wine tasting used to be reserved just for wine critices and sommeliers. But today, if you want to know anything about wine, the Internet is at your fingertips. Also, international wine certification (prominent examples are the UK’s WSET, the US’s CMS and Italy’s AIS) is getting more popular, where wine tasting can be learnt by taking a few lessons and is available to everyone. We consumers could easily do wine tasting at the comfort of our home.
4 Steps of Wine Tasting
1. Observe the Colour
The colour of a wine can tell you roughly the age and its grape variety. First check what colour it is. Most red wines are ruby. Then look at the intensity. Place the glass on a white, flat surface and look down from above. If the stem is invisible, it’s of high intensity (deep); if visible, then low intensity (pale).
A deep ruby red wine could possibly be made from grape varieties like Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon, Aglianico, or Sagrantino. A pale ruby red may be made from Pinot Noir, Nebbiolo, or Sangiovese.
The ruby colour turns brownish with time. You can tell that a red is no longer young when it’s on the garnet side.
For white wines, also place the glass on a white, flat surface and check the colour. White wines can be straw, lemon, gold or brown.
To determine intensity, tilt the glass at an angle of 45 degrees. Of high intensity (deep) if the colour extends to the rim; of low intensity (pale) if a colourless, watery rim.
With time, a white wine’s colour darkens. Between two whites made from Chardonnay, the straw one is young and the brownish yellow one is older.
2. Sniff the Aromas
First sniff to check the intensity. Then swirl the glass and smell what aromas (of fruits, flowers, food or other sources) there are. If only fresh fruit and floral aromas are present in a wine, the wine is young and has not been barrel-aged.
If you get vanilla in addition to fresh fruits and flowers, it’s been barrel-aged. If you get dried fruits or flowers, especially earth, leaf or leather in a red; honey, nuts or petroleum in a white, the wine is older.
3. Taste the Flavours
First determine the sweetness of the wine (dry, off-dry, semi-dry, semi-sweet or sweet). Then determine the acidity by holding the wine on both sides of your mouth and feeling how much your saliva is produced. The more vigorouly the saliva oozes, the more acidic the wine is. Then determine the tannins, applicable only to red wines, as white wines barely have tannins. The more astringent it feels on the palate, the more tannic the wine is. The astringent sensation, simply put, is that of the saliva on your gums being vacuumed to bone-dry. Then determine the body, which is the weight of the wine felt on the tongue. Usually the higher the alcohol content or the sweeter the wine, the fuller-bodied it is; the lower the alcohol content or the more acidic the wine, the lighter-bodied it feels.
In addition to dissecting those structural components of a wine mentioned above, it is also important to determine what flavours (of fruits, flowers, food or other sources) are present on the palate. Usually, if you get green apple on the nose, you’ll taste green apple on the palate too. But exceptions do exist. Some wines with wonderful aromas give you great expectations, but once you taste it, the flavours are only mediocre. In this case, the wine on the whole is mediocre because the palate outweighs the nose in wine tasting.
Finally, determine the finish, which is the length of time the lovely flavours of the wine linger in the mouth. The longer they do, the longer the finish is.
4. Determine the Quality
If a wine has a good balance of sweetness, acidity, tannins (only for reds) and body; the more varied the flavours on the palate, the more intense the flavours, and the longer the finish, the better quality the wine is.
Last but not least, wine tasting occurs in only a brief moment. If no notes are being taken as you taste it, you’ll soon forget what you’ve just smelled and tasted. My advice is to always have a pen and paper handy in any wine tasting. Even better if you’ve got a dedicated notebook. Doing so in the long term, you’ll be rewarded with a precious, systematic wine tasting record.
Happy wine tasting!
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