Tasting Wine

The first step in any wine tasting is to make sure you have all of the necessary tools: the wine, a glass, maybe some crackers and cheese, and of course, an interested person to do the tasting. Let’s start with the wine. There are may different themes you could have for a tasting; a varietal tasting (a tasting of a few different Chardonnays for example), a vintage tasting (tasting wines from a single year), a blind tasting (not knowing what wines are being tasted and attempting to figure them out), or a sweet tasting (tasting a bunch of different dessert wines) are to name a few. Next is the glassware, preferably a wine glass with a bowl and a stem. This will help with the sensory evaluation of the wine. Most importantly, have your palate ready to go. Try not to have strong flavors in your mouth (like toothpaste or coffee) before you taste wine. Chew a couple crackers and drink some water in order to cleanse your palate before you begin.

When evaluating wine, you are looking for three things; color, aroma and flavor. To judge the color of a wine, pour some into a glass, then lean that glass at a 45 degree angle over a piece of white paper. You’ll see that as the wine becomes shallower in the glass, the color of the wine becomes lighter. Take notice of the very edge of the wine in the glass, this will begin to tell the story of the wine. Take a white wine for example, a Chardonnay. The typical color of a California Chardonnay will be a golden yellow. However, if looking at the edge of the wine in the glass you find that the Chardonnay is more brown than golden, the wine is telling you something about itself. Maybe the wine is old and the color is fading or maybe there is something "off" in the wine and it’s affecting its color. These are things to keep in the back of your mind as you continue to evaluate the wine, so jot down a note describing the color of the wine in order to use this information later.

The next step is to evaluate the smell of the wine, or the "bouquet." First, swirl the wine around in your glass. An easy way to do this is to keep the base of the wine glass resting on a table and gently move the glass in small circles. As the wine is agitated in the glass, it aerates and releases its bouquet. Stick your nose in the glass, don’t be shy, get as close to the wine as possible and take a whiff. As you smell the wine, immediately begin to record its aromas. For example, if you are tasting Merlot, are there berry aromas in the wine? If so, are those aromas similar to strawberry, blueberry, blackberry or raspberries? There are many different aromas in a wine; together they create the bouquet of the wine. A good resource is an "aroma wheel" which breaks down the aromas in wine. Check it out at here. The more of the aromas you can recognize, the easier it will be to describe what you are tasting.

So now for the fun part, actually tasting the wine. Once you have examined the color and bouquet, it’s time to evaluate the flavors. Once you take a sip, the first thing to do is to evaluate the wine’s texture. To do this, your mouth has to "feel" the wine; so roll it around your mouth, swish it around, and think, "How does this make my mouth feel?" Is the wine light or heavy, does it dry your mouth out or does it make it water? Check out this image for a good resource on describing mouthfeel. Once you describe the wine’s texture, begin to decipher its flavors. Are you tasting the same things you smelled in the wine, or are the flavors different from the aromas? As the wine is in your mouth, try to imagine as many flavors as you can and see if you can taste those in the wine. Then, make a note of the flavors you do taste. Finally, swallow the wine or spit it out. Spitting a wine is not supposed to be disgusting or a commentary on the quality of a wine. Instead, it’s a way of tasting and evaluating the wine without consuming the alcohol. If you’ve ever tried to taste 100 wines in a day, you’ll know why spitting is so important. Once the wine is no longer in your mouth, you still have time to evaluate its flavor. Breathe through your nose and see if there are flavors lingering in your mouth. If there are, how long do those flavors last? That is a sign of the wine’s finish. A good rule of thumb is the better the wine, the longer the finish will be.

Congratulations! You’ve tasted your first wine. Now how do you transform, the "work" of tasting a wine into a fun event for you and your friends? Here’s a suggestion. Create a theme for your wine tasting; tell your friends you’ll be conducting a "blind tasting of Chardonnays from around the world." The object of this will be to taste a variety of wines, you’ll know they are all Chardonnays, but you will not know from what part of the world they are from. In order to put the tasting on, you’ll need your friends’ help.

First, go buy the wines; you’ll need six different Chardonnays (see the end for suggestions). To conduct the tasting, one person will open the wines, another person will disguise the wine bottles (say in a brown paper bag), and a third person will pour the wines in a random order. This way, you will know the wines to be tasted (you purchased them of course) but no one will know the order of the wines. Go through your tasting method of distinguishing color, aroma and flavor. Take some notes and have everyone rate the wines in order of preference. Once all of the wines are tasted, compare your notes. Why does one person like wine #2 the best when another prefers wine #5? Remember, it’s a matter of a person’s personal taste. See if there is any consensus in the group. Finally, reveal the six wines. What did people like? What did they dislike? Was it a big, oaky flavor from a Napa Chardonnay, or the crisp fruit flavor of a Burgundian Chardonnay, or the tropical flavors of a Chardonnay from Santa Barbara?

Once you and your friends begin to discover your palates and what you like and dislike, you can begin to broaden the themes of your tastings. Maybe taste a variety of wines from a particular region, or a single vintage, or try to pair wines with foods and see what flavors you discover. The most important thing is to enjoy the experience. The more you begin to "taste" wine rather than just "drink" wine, the more comfortable you will be with your palate and the more interesting new wines will become.

Enjoy! And remember to like what you drink and drink what you like.