How to taste wine? It's no rocket science, just an appreciation process.

 

Learning how to taste wines is a straightforward process and is more about enjoying the wine and its story while appreciating it. Look, swirl, smell and taste are simple steps towards acquainting your basic senses towards wine and slowly building a wine vocabulary of your own. Keep in mind wine tasting is majorly dependent on your olfactory receptors, so you do not want to be under the influences of strong flavours and aromas before your wine tasting experience.

Look

Pour wine into an appropriate wine glass and take a good look at the wine. Here you are looking at the colour and clarity of the wine. Tilt the glass away from you downwards and over a white background, preferably a white paper or a tablecloth. 

Wine colours are not only confined to red, white and pink. Red wines can have colours from purple, ruby, garnet, red, maroon and even brown. White wine can range from light green, pale yellow, golden, amber, brown in appearance.

Wine’s opaqueness helps to access the age of the wine as well as faults in the wine. Look if the wine is dull, cloudy or has sediments in it like bits of wine cork or if the wine has broken down. An older red wine often has orange tinge on the edges than younger wines and older white wines are darker than the younger white wines while comparing the same varietal at different ages.

Swirl

To get a good impression of the wine aroma, swirl your glass for a solid 4 to 6 seconds. This helps oxygen to incorporate in the wine to release more of its natural aromas and also aids in vaporizing some of the wine's alcohol that can mask the natural aromas.

Smell

Our sense of smell is crucial while assessing a wine. After swirling stick your nose down into the glass and take a deep inhale through your nose. Wine aromas are an excellent indicator of the wine’s quality and unique characteristics. You can smell aromas of berries, tropical fruits, flowers, citrus, stone fruits, oak, vanilla etc. from wines. 

Sometimes you also relate aromas with your memories, for example, the wine might smell like the bakery you visited as a child. 

Swirl the wine again and let the aromas mingle with each other as you experience and build your wine dictionary.

Taste

The final step is to taste. Take a small sip and let it roll around your mouth. You could also suck in a little air by your mouth where you let the oxygen mix with the wine sipped to release the notes to your olfactory receptors.

The initial impressions of the wine on the palate will be in terms of intensity and complexity, soft or firm, light or heavy, sweet or dry. These prominent indicators come from alcohol content, tannin levels, acidity and residual sugar in the wine.

Once the wine reaches mid-palate, you can then comprehend the taste of wine. In red wine you can come across notes of red or black fruit, stone fruits, minerals, spices like pepper, clove, cinnamon and/or flavours of oak, cedar, smoke, meat, leather, etc. In white wine, you can taste apple, pear, tropical, citrus fruits, floral notes, minerals, honey, butter, herbaceous, earthy notes, etc.

The final impression is how long the flavours linger on the palate, this denotes the finish of the wine. This is where the wine culminates and the aftertaste comes into effect. 

Lastly, if you are eager to learn more about wines and to store it in your memory, it is recommended to take tasting notes. With the tasting note, always remember to note down producer and vintage year of the wine which can help you make future references and/or comparisons.

Hope the above process was helpful to start your journey as a wine lover. Most importantly, just remember to enjoy the wine in your glass, understand what you like (as it is completely subjective) and keep exploring the wine world.