Wine Tasting 101
A little history of wine, first. Wine is the oldest alcoholic beverage ever produced. Dating back as far as 8,000 B.C., partakers of wine believed that drinking alcohol was a religious experience. Christians, Jews, and even the ancient Greeks associate wine consumption with spirituality. Dionysus was the Greek god of wine, and Jesus drank wine with his disciples during his Last Supper.
One of the first steps is learning how to taste wine so that you can get the most out of each new wine experience. By focusing on several important aspects in each wine tasting, you help to refine your palate, pick out subtle details, and really understand the wine. This helps take the experience of wine tasting from a simple consumption of a beverage to new heights of appreciation.
Wine appreciation, just like appreciating any art, requires experience to develop. The first time you taste a wine, you don't notice all the details. Some of these subtleties get lost on the novice. Only after tasting many wines and analyzing them in depth can you start to see these subtleties, both the good and the bad, and to distinguish a good wine from a poor one and to distinguish a good wine from a truly great one. Therefore, knowing how to taste wine as you get started is critical to avoid missing anything. Other tips like taking wine tasting notes in a wine tasting journal can help you to hone your appreciation, focus on details and to remember one wine from the next.
In the end, whether you like or don’t like a wine will come down to your own personal taste and preferences. So have fun.
The Steps of Wine Tasting
See. Like a psychic who gazes into a crystal ball, inspecting wine in the glass can help predict much of what’s to come on the nose and palate. The color, depth and intensity of a wine can offer a glimpse into its age, concentration, body, and overall style.
Swirl. Swirling is integral to aerate the wine and allow oxygen to “open it up.” This seductive art reveals a wine’s complexities, and it will raise intensity in most young, opulent bottlings as well as those aged beauties. Better yet, when done properly, it will wow and potentially hypnotize those around you.
Sniff/Smell. Don’t be afraid to shove your entire nose right into the glass. Wines with
medium to pronounced intensity shouldn’t need such a deep dive, but others may be a little bashful at first. In these cases, revert back to Step No. 2 and swirl some more. Aroma is usually where you hear all those cool, eccentric wine terms like “cat pee,” “wet dog” and “grilled watermelon.”
Sip. It takes a while to actually taste a wine during the examination process, but it’s often well
worth the wait. Plus, all the prior steps should impart a pretty good idea of how the wine should come across on the palate.
When pros taste wine, you may notice some pretty off-putting and downright disgusting sounds, but there are reasons for it. The swishing, swooshing, and gulping ensures that the wine hits all parts of the tongue and mouth. Thus, the taster can gauge sweetness, acidity, bitterness, tannins and identify the overall mouthfeel. Sucking in air allows for further aeration on the palate, and it helps volatile components be sensed by the olfactory system to tap in to all the characteristics of the wine.
Here, you look for primary characteristics (fruit, floral and spice), secondary characteristics (oak and fermentation-related flavors) and tertiary character (those that result from bottle aging, like mushroom, tobacco, and nuttiness), depending on the age of the wine.
Savor. Here’s where the finish comes into play. You want to savor the final essence of a wine. Here, you not only look for length, but balance of fruit, acidity, tannin, and texture. When a
wine leaves you with an overwhelming desire for another sip, you know you’ve found a winner.
Savor can be broken down into 2 smaller steps: Spit or Swallow. If you are tasting a large quantity of wine, spitting the wine after you examine the “mouth-feel” is perfectly acceptable. Also OK if you don’t like it. Otherwise, swallow the wine to get the full finish of the wine.
Wines that were Tasted:
2021 Governors Bay Sauvignon Blanc
2019 Butter Knife Chardonnay
2021 Justin Rosé
2019 Decoy Limited Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir
2019 Coppola Diamond Collection Merlot
2019 Hall Ranch Cabernet Sauvignon Paso Robles
2019 Michael David Winery Earthquake Zinfandel