HOW TO TASTE WINE
It’s easy to appreciate a taste of wine if you just attend to your senses—because of all things that we drink, wine is the most sensual.
So, pour yourself some wine—enough to fill a tulip-shaped glass just ¼ full—and let’s go.
Sight
Take a look at the wine in your glass. (This really works if you tilt the glass at an angle away from you and look down through the bowl against a white surface such as a tablecloth or a piece of paper.)
A wine’s depth of color often indicates its weight or intensity. (Pinot Noir is typically less powerful than Cabernet Sauvignon—and looks it.)
A wine’s color can tell you about its age. As a white wine gets older, it changes color from green-tinged straw, to yellow, to gold, to tawny (usually a sign of too much age). A red wine develops color from magenta, to ruby, to brick or maroon, to brown-red (again, usually too old to enjoy). If a wine’s label says that it is young, but the wine looks old, that’s not good.
Smell
Now swirl the wine around in the glass. A tulip-shaped glass helps trap the aromas that you’re releasing, so that you can better appreciate them.
The sense of smell is crucial to taste (no smell, no taste—like when you get a “code in your node”). Smell largely accounts for wine’s tasting so good.
Now stick your nose down deep into the bowl for a good, strong whiff.
What’s there? The smells of apples or berries; plums or peaches; all sorts of yellow or red or black fruits. Wood, earth, spice—all these perfumes and more come to our noses from wine.
And so do the bad smells, the warning smells—of vinegar or oxidation, funky cork, or too much wood aging.
Photo by Apolo Photographer on unsplash
Taste
Now for the fun part. Take a small sip of wine from the glass and slosh it around in your mouth—you can’t be cool and taste wine at the same time—allowing the hundreds of taste receptors all over your tongue do their job.
Wines are sweet, a little sweet or “dry” (i.e., not sweet). They’re framed by tangy acidity (or not). Tannins—the astringent feeling you get with many red wines, as if a tea bag had been steeped in them for too long—can be harsh, or chewy, or soft, or not present much at all.
Tastes ought to confirm what you’ve already smelled (that’s because most of what you taste is, in fact, what you’ve already smelled) and, so, can cover an enormous range of flavors.
Feel
It may seem strange to say so, but wine is a very tactile beverage.
For example, wine’s acidity gives it a profile or an edge. It delimits it. The opposite of acidity also is a feeling: a wine that is flat or dull.
Alcohol, sugar or glycerol, in varying degrees, can make a wine plump, viscous or round—or thin, weak or ephemeral. Tannins can give a wine grip or chalkiness and can close off a sip.
The tongue is like a scale when it drinks. It “weighs” a sip of wine. Some wines come flitting through the mouth like spilled poppy seeds. Others roll through, as big and as important as Schwarzeneggers.
The best food and wine combinations, in fact, may have to do with the tactility, the palpability of food and wine.
What’s best with the slippery ooze of an oyster? A thick, oily California Viognier? Never—only something like the razor’s edge of a Muscadet or Chablis, as dry as a lick on stone.
Pop a grilled sausage into your mouth, crack through its casing with a head-popping snap, and spill out the meat and fat like a smashed chain of beads. What’s the best wine? Something like a Syrah-based Rhône would do nicely, as sleek as sealskin.