The Art of Wine Tasting

Even though many just assume that wine tasting is sipping, swishing, and swallowing – many are amazed to find that it’s actually a bit more.  Wine tasting is more of an art, an art that is used to distinguish the taste of fine wines.  Wine can be a tasty and refreshing drink – if the bottle was stored correctly and aged properly.

Wine tasting begins with the swishing.  The reason why wine tasters swish the wine around in their mouths is to get the taste.  Both the front and the back areas of the tongue contain taste buds, although neither one has any distinct sensation in taste.  Taste buds can detect food and liquid that is bitter, salty or sweet, without a problem.  To get the proper taste from wine however, you need to swish it around in your mouth and allow your taste buds and sense of smell to bring out the unique and fine flavors in the wine.

When you have a cold however, the wine can taste very different.  When tasting your wine, your sense of smell has a major impact on the taste.  What many fail to realize, is that over 75% of our taste is due to our sense of smell.  When we have a cold, our sense of smell is affected.  Therefore, when eating or tasting wine with a cold, the taste will appear different.  Wine tasters all over the world will tell you that tasting wine is more about a sense of smell than the actual taste buds.

The art of wine tasting is indeed an art.  Wine tasters do however, follow some general guidelines and rules that judge how great a wine is.  These techniques can help you bring the most out of your wine, providing you follow them and know how to bring out the taste.

The first thing to do with wine is to look.  With wine, you can tell quite a bit about it by looking at it.  You should always start by pouring the wine into a clear glass, then taking a few minutes to look at the color.  As far as the color goes, white whines aren’t white, but actually yellow, green, or brown.  Red wines on the other hand are normally a pale red or dark brown color.  Red wine gets better with age, while white whines get more stale with age.

Next, is the smell of the wine, which you should do in two steps.  You should start with a brief smell to get a general idea of the wine, then take a deep, long smell.  This deeper smell should allow you take the flavor of the wine in.  The more experienced wine tasters prefer to sit back a bit and think about the smell before they actually taste the wine. 

Last but not least, is to taste the wine.  To properly taste the wine, you should first take a sip, swish it around in your mouth, and then swallow.  Once you swish the wine around in your mouth, you’ll bring out the rich and bold flavors of the wine.  After swallowing, you’ll be able to distinguish the after taste of the wine, and the overall flavor.

Once you have looked at the wine, smelled it, and finally tasted it, you’ll be able to evaluate the wine from a taster’s standpoint.  This is the easiest way to determine the quality of the wine, and whether or not it has been properly stored and aged.  As with all things in life – the more you taste wine – the better you will get at distinguishing the unique flavors.

The Correct Order of Tasting Wine in a Wine Tasting Event

The one thing that you shouldn’t do when you’re tasting wine is to taint your sense of smell and taste by smoking before or during your tasting, or eating anything before or during your tasting. This is one sure fire way to dull your taste buds and to mangle up your wine tasting. And for certain if you’re near any other wine tasters, they won’t like if you smoke anywhere near them.

Quite a few people advocate tasting wine blindly. This means that you taste the wine without looking at its label. This will save you initial prejudice or favoritism you might feel towards that particular wine if you know details about it. And if you’re tasting wine more than once, or a number of different reds and whites, then ideally you should take things in a light to dense order. In other words, taste the lighter wines first, then move on to the heavier wines.

If you don’t know the difference yourself, then use your judgment as far as possible by using your sense of smell and your sight first. There are more often than not, distinct qualities for the different wines and these can be told most of the time by sight and smell alone.

For instance, sweet heavy wines will be thicker and leave streaks on the sides of glass when it it’s swirled, these are generally referred to as the legs on a wine. And once upon a time, the amount of these legs was used as a determinant for the quality of a wine, i.e. the greater the amount of legs on a glass that better quality the wine was.

In reality that’s not the case however, and the days of determining the quality of a wine in that method are long since gone. The legs of the wine can however, help you to determine whether the wine is a heavy or one or not, as these tend to leave the most number of legs on a glass.

Like I said the order of tasting wine should be from light to dark, or from white to red. But before you start off with your white wines you might want to take a look at your sparkling wines first.

Since I threw that in merely to confuse you, I shall also now take you out of that confusion, by giving you the correct descending order for tasting wine. In other words start from the top and make your way through the wines in an orderly fashion! So, start with the sparkling wines like champagne first, then go on to the light white wines, and next on to the heavy white wines. Take a trip to the rosés after that, and then move on to the light red wines.

Next, head on over to the heavy red wines before making a stop at the sweet wines section. One last thing about tasting wine, you should be aware of. At formal tasting wine events where there will almost definitely be more than one wine to taste, the tasters will be in the habit of spitting out their small mouthful of wine into a provided receptacle.

This will generally be in the form of a spittoon filled with sawdust. The sawdust is added to soak up the wine and prevent the wine splashing back.

The spittoon is provided so that the wine tasters don’t become drunk on the amounts of wine they are tasting.

Most likely at a tasting wine event, you will also be presented with water in which to rinse out your mouth after tasting wine, which you again spit out, or unsalted crackers or French bread with which to soak up the wine.