Tasting wine is pretty straightforward, but there are a few tips that professionals use either as a way of trying to identify a wine in a blind tasting, or just to get a little more enjoyment of it. Personally, I am always in search of that 'aha' moment when a wine grabs my full attention no matter what else is going on.
Here are the practical basics, and some more details for each are listed below.
A. Look at the wine - for color, clarity, depth, staining, legs. (Explanations of these terms in the deep dive later in this post.)
B. Sniff the wine - do this without swirling first. Just slowly bring the glass to your nose. Stick your nose deep into the glass when you can. I always recommend doing this with your mouth open. It brings more information. (Try it with and then without your mouth open - you'll see!) Take note of the first words that pop into your head (like "bubble gum" or "bananas" or "cherries"). These are your descriptors.
C. Swirl and sniff again - swirling releases the esters which the alcohol helps bring to your nose.
D. Sip - Take a good sized sip and hold it in your mouth. You can swish it around like mouthwash if you want to get more information from it. Give your mouth a moment to warm the wine up and release more esters. Try to get a sense of how thick the liquid feels in your mouth. Do you sense any sweetness or sourness?
E. Swallow - and wait. Once you swallow, you can start to evalaute the wine's finish. Do new flavors continue to arise? for how long? Draw in more air and see if anything changes. You can also try to sense the acidity in wine by how much your mouth waters after the wine is gone, and the tannic quality of wine by how dried out your mouth feels.
That's it! Easy.
-------------------------
Now for the deeper dive for those of you looking for SO much more.
A - Look:
Always take a second to look a the wine in the glass, preferably against a light or white background. What are you looking for?
1. Color - note if it's pale straw, greenish, golden, ruby, purple brick red, orange, brown. Greenish means young. Golden sometimes indicates oak or oxidation. Orange or brown can indicate age, oxidation, or could be a typical color (like in Nebbiolo). Malbec is a crazy beautiful, distinctive purple.
2. Clarity or bubbles - some unfiltered wines will be hazy. Haze can also come from a wine that hasn't been heat stabilized, and some protein molecules have precipitated out.
3. Depth - can you see through it (like with Pinot Noir) or is it totally opaque (like Syrah). You're basically trying to determine if you can read words through it to gauge the depth. It can give you an idea of what wine you have.
4. Staining - a few varieties, Syrah and Malbec in particular, will stain the glass when you swirl it around. The color of the wine sticks to the glass for a short while and is visible. This can help you identify particularly this skinned grape varieties. Malbec, for instance, is most successfully grown at altitude where the intense sun exposure causes the vines to produce super thick skinned grapes. The thicker the skins, the more anthocyanins develop, and the more color the skins can impart to the finished wine.
B- Sniff:
Most of what we taste in wine is an aroma. Aromas come from the compounds formed during fermentation and absorbed and developed during the aging process. There are so many categories of aromas. Wine descriptors are words we use to describe what we are smelling, seeing and tasting. If you want to know more about how to identify wine descriptors - read my post on "Why can't I smell what my partner smells?"
When you first sniff a wine, do it delicately. Sniff lightly at first, and short. Then you can sniff more deeply. Take note of when you start to smell the wine as you bring it closer to your nose. Do you smell it from a mile away (highly aromatic wines jump out of the glass at you) or is it really subtle and delicate and unwilling to reveal itself until you get your nose right in the glass and take a bigger sniff.
It helps if you start in broad categories, e.g. fruit, spice, vegetables. I recommend that you find an aroma wheel online. Use the aroma wheel by starting in the middle and working your way out. Here are some examples of categories. In item 1 below you start with "fruit", then go on to ask yourself, "Is the fruit citrus or berries", and if you decide it's citrus, is it "lemon or orange", and so on. Don't be discouraged if you can't drill down that deep. Sometimes even expertly trained noses can't get beyond "red fruit". Some aromas in wine are just not super specific. (Also - spend some time sniffing the jars in your spice cabinet. This was a favorite game I played with my kids when they were young.
1. Fruit flavors -
a. Citrus - orange, lemon, grapefruit
b. Tropical - pineapple, banana, mango
c. Berries - raspberry, blackberry, blueberry
d. Dried Fruits - raisin, dried cherry, prunes, dates
e. Tree Fruits - apples, cherries, apricots, peaches and nectarines
2. Spice Flavors -
a. cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves & other baking spices
b. oregano, thyme, rosemary & other herbs
c. Black pepper, white pepper
3. Vegetable Flavors -
a. Green bell pepper, asparagus,
b. Mint, grass, eucalyptus
c. Green olive, black olive
4. Earthy / Smoky Flavors -
a. earth, dirt, mushroom, dust, soy
b. smoke, tar, burnt toast, coffee
C- Swirl:
I'm not going to expand too much on this as it's pretty straightforward. Just try not to swirl too hard or slosh it out of your glass. It might be easiest to swirl it with the foot of the wine glass still resting on the table.
D. Sip :
I'm not kidding when I say swish your wine around in your mouth like mouthwash. Make sure it gets in front of your teeth and exposed to your gum line above your teeth and your lips. When you are considering the 'weight' of a wine, compare it in your mind to milk. Very thin wine is like non-fat milk. These wines are typically more acidic so you will also detect sourness. Very thick wine is like whole milk. Thick wines are either high in alcohol, with which you will have an accompanying 'burn' similar to when you throw back a shot of whiskey, or high in residual sugar. A wine high in sugar should be obviously sweet, but high acidity can balance that out. Also, high alcohol wines can be perceived as somewhat sweet. Don't mistake 'fruity' for sweet. You should be able to detect the sweetness in a wine when you plug your nose. So here you are swishing wine around in your mouth like mouthwash and plugging your nose to see if you can tell if it's sweet. Yeah, maybe do this at home first.
You can only sense four wine-related descriptors with your mouth. These are sensations you don't need your nose to detect. Sweetness which comes from residual sugar, Sourness which comes from acids in wine and makes your mouth water, Bitterness which comes from tannins in wine and dries your mouth out because the tannins are literally binding with your saliva, Umami, which is a sense of 'savoryness' like you'd get from some Asian foods because of the MSG (Or you can just sip straight MSG to figure this out. I don't recommend that. I didn't find it very pleasant.) You can also detect saltiness in foods with your tongue. Usually we don't talk about salt in wine, although some wines, especially those that grow in maritime regions, can actually seem to have a flavor of salinity. I'm not saying that the salinity comes from the sea, but it's just an interesting association I've noticed with some wines. I'll let you be the judge as you expand your tasting range.
In any event, as I mentioned earlier your body temperature is going to warm up the wine. This releases new flavors! These new flavors are delivered to your olfactory senses retro-nasally. So you may only be able to taste sour, sweet, bitter, salt and umami on your tongue, but you can still get aroma flavors from your wine through your mouth.
E. Swallow
A long finish is a good indicator of quality - think of it as 'more bang for your buck'. The longer you can sit enjoying how the wine develops in your mouth after you've swallowed it, the slower you drink the glass of wine and the more enjoyment you get out of it. So for an expensive wine, I'd like to think that you want to have it last and that you can savor it for a long time.
The finish of a wine can deliver some of the best moments in wine tasting. Some of my favorite moments have happened while sipping wine and watching TV of all things. When a wine's finish can draw my attention away from the TV and make me say "Oh! Wow," that's really something. It's really delicious. It's really memorable. Thank you winemakers.
As I mentioned in section D, tannins will dry your mouth out by binding with the saliva. The good thing about this is that your mouth is nice and refreshed, ready for the next bite of food or taste of wine. However, a particularly tannic wine can be pretty harsh. "Green" tannins, or young tannins which come from wines that have a little less phenolic ripeness perhaps because they were picked early or grown in a cool climate, can be very harsh and astringent. These tannins will soften up and develop over time, which is why aging wine can be very popular. A winery that practices good phenolic management can produce wines with "Soft" tannins. These are astringent, but not too grippy or harsh. Tannins make your wine feel 'bigger' and 'heavier'. Tannins are usually considered the backbone of a wine's structure. So, for those of you who like 'big red wines', you are looking for highly tannic wines. These are bold, strong and grippy.
As I write this, I find there are so many things to expand upon. But, I am not writing a book here. Just some guidelines. If you have questions, email me to let me know. (Lisab.iwp@gmail.com). I'd be happy to create some shorter posts with further explanations.
No comments:
Post a Comment