Wine Tasting for beginner
Let’s start saying that this is a very complicated matter. People with more experience than us wrote infinite articles and books about this. The purpose of this post is to give a head start to beginner and to complement the other post “How to organize a wine tasting with your friends”.
When you are drinking wine normally you should just relax and enjoy it. However, if you want to make an effort to understand the wines and you have few ones to taste you should really take some notes. It will help your focus and you can read them later on again. You will forget what you drunk pretty soon otherwise.
To avoid confusion during the tasting, we also have a sheet of paper below your glasses (see pic on the right) and note down there which wine is in each glass. You can write the wine name directly or a number that refers to the tasting sheet you are using. Put the glass back in the right place. The safest is to only move one glass at the time. It is very easy to switch glasses and you do not know what you are tasting anymore.
Below each glass there is a number. In the tasting sheet we noted which wine corresponded to each number. As long as you put the glass back to his number you cannot mix the wines.
There exist different tasting grids depending on the book you read or the association you belong (see on the right the WSET and AIS). The terms vary a bit but, in general, there are four sections you need to keep in mind:
Appearance
Nose
Palate
Overall Conclusions
We will not go through all the above sections in detail. We will only try to give you some hints on how to approach a tasting. If you want to know more write to us and attend one of our tasting. Tasting cannot be learnt only reading. It takes a lot of time to learn it.
1) Look at the wine.
Depending on the grape and on the age the color can vary a lot. For a beginner, it is very important to check if there are impurities. Wine must be clear, with few exceptions.
2) Smell the wine, what do you feel? Smell it again.
In modern times we do not rely on our noses too much so we are not used to recognizing smells. There is no way out than training.
To give you a start, try to think if the smell is intense or not using the other wines to compare. Is number 1 stronger than number 2? Can you feel different flavors from each glass? What about the same glass few minutes later?
Suggestion: every wine has hints of fruit and flowers. Can you recognize something? Perhaps citrus fruits (lemon, orange?) and flowers (roses, violets?).
Another relatively “easy” flavor comes from the barrel, it gives to wine flavors of coffee, chocolate, toasted wood (remember that not all wines “do” barrels).
3) Sip the wine, keep it in your mouth for few seconds, then drink it (or spit it if you have to taste many and/or drive)
Important to know is that wins have hard and soft parts and these must be balanced.
Soft parts
Sweetness: this is the amount of sugar left in the wine.
Alcohol: you should feel heat in your throat and it is easy to check from the bottle.
Exercise: taste the first wine and read the vol% in the bottle. Try to use that wine as baseline and guess if the second has equal/more/less alcohol.
Hard parts
Tannins: they make your mouth dry, you feel them in different parts of the mouth but usually you can feel your gums stretching. ONLY in red wine
Acidity aka freshness: it has nothing to do with the servomg temperature of the wine. It refers to how much saliva the wine makes you produce. Try to think (or taste) about biting a lemon and see how your mouth reacts. It is the normal reaction to sour taste.
Trick: after swallowing the wine, try to bend you head looking at the floor and see if you feel the saliva dripping.
Try first to think about all the 4 components singularly, and then observe if any of them overcome the others. If so, the wine is not really balanced. For instance, if a sweet wine has no acidity you feel like drinking a sirup. While a great Sauternes with an 120 grams per liter of residual sugars can be drunk due to his acidity.
Homework: Check how much sugar is contained in your favorite soft drink (ice-tea, coca cola), most likely less than 120g/L but tastes much sweeter than Sauternes
4) Think about the wine you have just drunk.
Last thing you should pay attention is how long the wine aromas stay in your mouth after you swallow it. Just count the seconds, the more the better. This is call “persistence” and a wine can be long (more than 10 secs) or short (2-3 secs).
At this point you are ready for your final observation, you can give points, a grade, yes/no, I like/hate, anything that helps you to remember what you’ve just drunk.
Final remarks
There are several point systems, I am not a fan of them in general but you can use them to have a quick summary and with time to build some (very personal) rank of the wines you drunk.
It is also good to have in mind your goals when you do a wine tasting. Are you trying to learn something about a particular grape? Do you want to know if you like one more than the other?
In many cases it is good to taste wines blind.
Exercise: taste an expensive and a cheap wine from the same producer. Do you spot any difference? Which one you like more? You should taste them blind because otherwise most likely your brain will trick you into thinking the most expensive is better.
As final note remember that we have all different senses, perceptions and experiences. We will need another post to discuss that but for now remember that this is not an exact science.