So, how do you taste and evaluate a glass of wine? Follow our wine
tasting tips below—but before you start, make sure you’re in the right
tasting environment.
Tasting Conditions
First, make note of the circumstances surrounding your wine tasting
experience that may affect your impressions of the wine: A noisy or
crowded room makes concentration difficult. Cooking smells, perfume and
even pet odor can destroy your ability to get a clear sense of a wine’s
aromas. A glass that is too small, the wrong shape, or smells of
detergent or dust, can also affect the wine’s flavor.
The temperature of the wine will also have an impact on your
impressions, as will the age of the wine and any residual flavors from
whatever else you have been eating or drinking. You want to neutralize
the tasting conditions as much as possible, so the wine has a fair
chance to stand on its own. If a wine is served too cold, warm it with
your hands by cupping the bowl. If a glass seems musty, give it a quick
rinse with wine, not water, swirling it around to cover all the sides of
the bowl. This is called conditioning the glass. Finally, if there are
strong aromas nearby—especially perfume—walk as far away from them as
you can and try to find some neutral air.
Evaluating by Sight
Once your tasting conditions are as close to neutral as possible, your
next step is to examine the wine. The glass should be about one-third
full and you should loosely follow the following steps to completely
evaluate the wine visually.
Straight Angle View
First, look straight down into the glass, then hold the glass to the
light, and finally, give it a tilt, so the wine rolls toward its edges.
This will allow you to see the wine’s complete color range, not just the
dark center.
Looking down, you get a sense of the depth of color, which gives a clue
to the density and saturation of the wine. You will also learn to
identify certain varietal grapes by color and scent. A deeply-saturated,
purple-black color might well be syrah or zinfandel, while a lighter,
pale brick shade would suggest pinot noir or sangiovese.
Side View
Viewing the wine through the side of the glass held in light shows you how clear it is.
A murky wine might be a wine with chemical or fermentation problems. On
the other hand, it might just be a wine that was unfiltered or has some
sediment due to be shaken up before being poured. A wine that looks
clear and brilliant and shows some sparkle, is always a good sign.
Tilted View
Tilting the glass so the wine thins out toward the rim will provide clues to the wine’s age and weight.
If the color looks quite pale and watery near its edge, it suggests a
rather thin, possibly insipid wine. If the color looks tawny or brown
(for a white wine) or orange or rusty brick (for a red wine) it is
either an older wine or a wine that has been oxidized and may be past
its prime.
Swirl
Finally, give the glass a good swirl. You can swirl it most easily by
keeping it firmly on a flat surface; open air “freestyle” swirling is
not recommended for beginners.
Notice if the wine forms “legs” or “tears” that run down the sides of
the glass. Wines that have good legs are wines with more alcohol and
glycerin content, which generally indicates that they are bigger, riper,
more mouth-filling and dense than those that do not.
Evaluating by Sniff
Now that you’ve given the wine a good look, you’re ready to take a good
sniff. Give the glass a swirl, but don’t bury your nose inside it.
Instead, you want to hover over the top like a helicopter pilot
surveying rush hour traffic. Take a series of quick, short sniffs, then
step away and let the information filter through to your brain.
There are many guides to help you train your nose to identify key wine
fragrances, both good and bad. There are potentially thousands of aroma
components in a glass of good wine, so forget about finding them all.
Naming all the fruits, flowers, herbs and other scents you can trowel
out of the glass can be a fun game, but it’s not essential to enjoying
and learning how to taste wine. Once you’ve taken a few quick, short
sniffs of the wine, try to look for the following aromas, which will
help you better understand the wine’s characteristics.
Wine Flaws
First, you want to look for off-aromas that indicate a wine is spoiled.
A wine that is corked will smell like a musty old attic and taste like a
wet newspaper. This is a terminal, unfixable flaw.
A wine that has been bottled with a strong dose of SO2 will smell like
burnt matches; this will blow off if you give it a bit of vigorous
swirling.
A smell of vinegar indicates VA (volatile acidity); a nail polish smell is ethyl acetate.
Brettanomyces—an undesirable yeast that reeks of sweaty saddle scents. A
little bit of “brett” gives red wines an earthy, leathery component;
but too much obliterates all the flavors of fruit.
Learning to identify these common flaws is at least as important as
reciting the names of all the fruits and flowers. And it will also help
you to understand your own palate sensitivities and blind spots.
Discovering what you recognize and enjoy is key to learning how to
choose wine on your own.
Fruit Aromas
If there are no obvious off-aromas, look for fruit aromas. Wine is made
from grapes, so it should smell like fresh fruit, unless it is very
old, very sweet, or very cold.
You can learn to look for specific fruits and grapes, and many grapes
will show a spectrum of possible fruit scents that help you to identify
the growing conditions—cool climate, moderate or very warm—of the
vineyard.
Flowers, Leaves, Herbs, Spices & Vegetables
Floral aromas are particularly common in cool climate white wines like riesling and gewürztraminer, and some Rhône varietals, including viognier.
Some other grapes can be expected to carry herbal or grassy scents. Sauvignon blanc is often strongly grassy, while cabernet sauvignon can be scented with herbs and hints of vegetation. Rhône reds often show delightful scents of Provençal herbs. Most people prefer that any herbal aromas are delicate. The best wine aromas are complex but also balanced, specific but also harmonious.
Another group of common wine aromas might be characterized as earthy. Scents of mushroom, damp earth, leather and rock can exist in many red wines.
A mushroom smell can add nuance; it can also help you determine a possible grape or place of origin of the wine. Too much mushroom may just mean that the grapes failed to ripen sufficiently, or were from an inferior clone.
The scent of horse or tack room leather can be an accent, but too much can indicate brettanomyces.
Scents of earth, mineral and rock sometimes exist in the very finest white and red wines. These can be indications of “terroir”—the particular conditions of the vineyard that are expressed as specific scents and flavors in the finished wine.
Wine Barrel Aromas
If you smell toast, smoke, vanilla, chocolate, espresso, roasted nuts,
or even caramel in a wine, you are most likely picking up scents from
aging in new oak barrels.
Depending upon a multitude of factors, including the type of oak, the
way the barrels were made, the age of the barrels, the level of char and
the way the winemaker has mixed and matched them, barrels can impart a
vast array of scents and flavors to finished wines. Think of the barrels
as a winemaker’s color palette, to be used the way a painter uses tubes
of paint.
Secondary Aromas
Young white wines and young sparkling wines may have a scent very reminiscent of beer. This is from the yeast.
Some dessert wines smell strongly of honey; this is evidence of
botrytis, often called noble rot, and is typical of the very greatest
Sauternes.
Chardonnays that smell of buttered popcorn or caramel have most likely been put through a secondary, malolactic fermentation, which converts malic to lactic acids, softening the wines and opening up the aromas.
Older wines have more complex, less fruity aromas. A fully mature wine can offer an explosion of highly nuanced scents, beautifully co-mingled and virtually impossible to name. It is pure pleasure.
Nonetheless, the effort to put words to wine aromas helps you focus on, understand and retain your impressions of different wines. You want to build a memory bank of wine smells and their meanings. That is where the language of wine can add value to a wine tasting event. Learning to talk the talk, if not carried to extremes, helps to dispel some wine myths, such as the confusion surrounding descriptions on wine labels. Have you ever known anyone to ask why a winery added grapefruit to its gewürztraminer and raspberries to its zinfandel? The fact that these are simply descriptive terms is not always understood.
Evaluating by Taste
It’s finally time to taste! Take a sip, not a large swallow, of wine
into your mouth and try sucking on it as if pulling it through a straw.
Ignore the stares of those around you; this simply aerates the wine and
circulates it throughout your mouth.
Again, you’ll encounter a wide range of fruit, flower, herb, mineral,
barrel and other flavors, and if you’ve done your sniffing homework,
most will follow right along where the aromas left off. Aside from
simply identifying flavors, you are also using your taste buds to
determine if the wine is balanced, harmonious, complex, evolved, and
complete.
Balanced
A balanced wine should have its basic flavor components in good
proportion. Our taste buds detect sweet, sour, salty, and bitter.
Sweet (residual sugar) and sour (acidity) are obviously important
components of wine. Saltiness is rarely encountered and bitterness
should be more a feeling of astringency (from tannins) than actual
bitter flavors.
Most dry wines will display a mix of flavors derived from the aromas,
along with the tastes of the acids, tannins and alcohol, which cannot
generally be detected simply by smell.
There is no single formula for all wines, but there should always be
balance between the flavors. If a wine is too sour, too sugary, too
astringent, too hot (alcoholic), too bitter, or too flabby (lack of
acid) then it is not a well-balanced wine. If it is young, it is not
likely to age well; if it is old, it may be falling apart or perhaps
completely gone.
Harmonious
A harmonious wine has all of its flavors seamlessly integrated. It’s
quite possible, especially in young wines, for all the components to be
present in the wine in good proportion, but they stick out. They can be
easily identified, but you can feel all the edges; they have not blended
together. It’s a sign of very good winemaking when a young wine has
already come together and presents its flavors harmoniously.
Complex
Complexity can mean many things. Your ability to detect and appreciate
complexity in wine will become a good gauge of your overall progress in
learning how to taste wine.
The simplest flavors to recognize—very ripe, jammy fruit and strong
vanilla flavors from various oak treatments—are reminiscent of soft
drinks. It is perfectly natural for new wine drinkers to relate to them
first, because they are familiar and likeable. Some extremely successful
wine brands have been formulated to offer these flavors in abundance.
But they do not offer complexity.
Complex wines seem to dance in your mouth. They change, even as you’re
tasting them. They are like good paintings; the more you look at them
the more there is to see. In older wines, these complexities sometimes
evolve into the realm of the sublime. The length of a wine, whether old
or young, is one good indication of complexity. Simply note how long the
flavors linger after you swallow. You might even try looking at your
watch if you have a particularly interesting wine in your glass. Most
beginning wine drinkers move on too quickly to the next sip when a
really good wine is in the glass. Hold on! Let the wine finish its dance
before you change partners.
Complete
A complete wine is balanced, harmonious, complex and evolved, with a
lingering, satisfying finish. Such wines deserve extra attention,
because they have more to offer, in terms of both pleasure and training,
than any others you will taste.
Now that you understand the basic steps with our wine tasting tips,
it’s time to experiment on your own. It can be quite helpful to build a
wine journal of your adventures. Write complete tasting notes for wines
you like and dislike. Noting the characteristics that each wine shares
will be immensely helpful as you start learning how to choose wine on
your own. Cheers!