Learn to Taste and Critique Wine Easy Tips For the Beginner

If you’ve seen others tasting fine wines and offering up their critiques, you might be a little bit intimidated to try it for yourself.  There seems to be a series of mystical steps – swishing, sniffing, tilting, and so on – before one even takes their first sip.  What’s the point of all that?  Once one has taken that first sip, they begin spouting off all kinds of surprising words: a luminous hue, notes of pecan and truffle, a cinnamon-like finish, etc etc.  Are these people from Mars, or are they just trying to make you feel uneducated?

In reality, wine tasting isn’t as convoluted as some people would like to pretend it is.  The goal of a tasting is to experience the wine in question as thoroughly as possible, putting all of your senses into action as you assess and come to know all the elements of what’s in the glass in front of you.  While there are common stages involved, you can rest assured that there is no one right way to do it.  The key is to experience the wine and to immerse yourself in the experience – and that’s it!

Understand That Taste is the Culmination

During a typical wine-tasting, the actual tasting portion comes last.  You want to use as many senses as possible to entice your palette before the wine ever reaches your mouth.  In the past, you’ve probably heard people say that your sense of smell informs your sense of taste.  It’s true, and likewise, each of your other senses (excluding your hearing) has the opportunity to contribute to the flavors you taste. 

 

While all this sounds complicated, try blindfolding yourself and eating a piece of cheese or fresh fruit.  You’ll probably notice the flavor seems more intense.  That is because your sense of taste is increased if you close your eyes.  The key to becoming a professional wine taster is to take time and explore each sense in turn, and let everything come together in the final tasting.


How to Truly Savor Wine:


Sight and Sound

 

It’s easy to get started.  Pour yourself a glass of wine, and start with what you can see.  Examine the hue of the liquid.  How deep and murky is the color?  When you tilt the glass, how easily does the liquid slide around?  What noise does it make when you swish it around, is it thin and watery or rich and thick?  Explore all of the visual and audible properties you can before moving on to smelling the aroma. 

 

Smell

 

If you swish the wine around in a circle, you’ll release a stronger and more full aroma into the glass, which will allow you to have a richer end experience.  Put your nose right into the glass and get a good sniff!  

 

Try to find words for what you’re smelling, even if those words sound silly – does the wine smell like dirt, grass, cherries or butter?  Each are valid critiques.  There are no ‘official’ words.  The key is to find words for the smell, no matter how strange those words seem, and voice them.


Taste

 

Only once you’ve thoroughly examined the way the wine looks, smells, and move about in the glass, only then is it time to taste the wine.  What you’ll notice is that each of these other steps will inform the flavors that you sense, culminating in a taste experience that combines all of your senses into one explosive taste.

What to Taste For

When you taste, attempt to notice how the flavor changes over the course of a sip.  Most wines start out with an early taste (called a ‘note’), which is something that you can taste right away.  That leads into the body of the flavor.  Once the wine leaves your mouth, the after-taste is known as a ‘finish.’ 

 

Think about how each stage of the sip tastes, and how it transitions in your mouth.  Find words to describe the sensations: does the wine get “darker” as you swallow?  Does it seem to “open up”?  No critique is going to be wrong in the eclectic and exciting world of wine tasting!

 

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