How to Taste Wine.

Part one - The Sense of Smell.

"Tasting wine" is very different from “drinking wine.”  When we "taste wine" we are trying to workout the wines characteristics, and even more importantly, what we like and dislike in the wine.

Believe it or not, the singular most important factor is your sense of smell. (That’s how you use your nose, not when you had a shower.) To illustrate this, think what happens when you have a cold and your nose is clogged up. You not only have trouble smelling anything, you also have difficulty tasting anything. Even great food seems like tasteless crap.  That's because your olfactory senses (hooter) are linked to your taste buds.  Taste buds can only taste, sweet, sour, bitter and salt. (Astringency caused by the tannins is a sensation, not a taste.) It’s your sense of smell that gives you a much greater enjoyment of taste, rather than the taste buds themselves.

If you have seen wine judges in action, they look at the wine, sniff it for a while, sip some, swirling it around the mouth, suck in air, swirl that around their mouth and spit the wine out. (Fine to do that with cheap swill, but imagine having to do that with Grange, the mind boggles.)  They don't need to swallow the wine to know with the taste like.  In fact most experienced wine judges can give you an incredibly accurate description of the wine just from nosing (smelling) the wine.

If you also look at those same judges in action you will see they use a specific type of glass.  It’s known as an ISO glass and is shaped to be able to allow the taster to get the most from the aroma (smell) of the wine.  Many cheap BYO restaurants and pubs serve wine in revoltingly shaped round glasses that make it almost impossible to smell the wine with any degree of accuracy.  Some of the more expensive restaurants have good-looking crystal goblets. Whilst these may look great, unfortunately that's exactly what they are designed to do, “look great,” they do nothing to help you taste or judge the wine.

My advice to you is purchase a six-pack of ISO glasses; they only cost a few dollars each, or if you have lots of money, purchase some Riedel glasses, which are the big impressive ones.

To try and explain how to sniff wine in 500 words is impossible. However here are a few things for consideration. Firstly, it’s not difficult, it just takes the right glasses, a little bit of knowledge and some practice, but you must have the right glasses first.

Assuming you have the glasses, and a bottle of wine, try and find some tasting notes (TN) for the wine. Often there are some on the back of the bottle, or you if you buy from Winestar, sometimes the TN are in the email that you receive when the wine is offered for sale. There are also heaps of places on the net where you can find TN.

Swirl the wine round the glass and sniff deeply, see if you can describe what you smell, if not don’t worry, you are learning. Use the TN and see if you can find the scents mentioned. All it takes is practice and soon you will be an expert.

Cheers

Ric

Copyright © Ric Einstein 2003