An Easy Guide To Wine Tasting.

You may have read plenty of “How-To” articles and blogs on how to taste wine, with all these fancy words and jargon that seem quite obscure.

We are here to break it down to 4 simple steps. The very basic steps that are effortless and can help you to describe the wine you are tasting and even improve your palate and your knowledge of the wines you like.

1.  SWIRL AND LOOK

Small swirls, big swirls. It’s up to you. Swirl the glass however way you are comfortable enough to know that you won’t spill it. Why swirling though? Some would argue that swirling is for show but we can assure you this is not the case.

The reason why people swirl their wine is to encourage the wine to release the flavour through hundreds of unique aromas. As it swirls the wine makes contact with the oxygen in the air, which will help to enrich the smelling and tasting experience.

Let’s then have a quick glance at the colour of the wine. Colour is very much influenced by what type of grapes it is made from and the age of the wine. For example, the darker colour the red wine is, it means it’s made of darker and/or riper grapes and vice versa with the lighter ones.

2. SNIFF AND SMELL

And we mean it, literally! Put your nose inside the rim of the wine glass, take a deep breath, count until 3 and feel your lungs fill with the aerosol from the wine. Stop there and bring your memory back to those days where perhaps you went shopping for a new wallet, and you were inspecting it and you bring it closer to your nose to smell the new leather.

Perhaps when you stroll around the local parks and pick up a flower that just bloomed and you sniff it before you tuck it in behind your ear. Or when you are doing your grocery shopping, stopping at the fruit market to buy some fresh berries for your breakfast. Or even perhaps when you walk past a cafe smelling the brewed coffee and hot pastries.

Your memory of different scents related to each event is so powerful that it stays within you even if you don't think you'd remember them, and your nose is your medium to bring them back. And that's exactly what you do when you smell a wine. You tie up these scents that you have smelt before and the memory of the object or experience.

This is how you can easily tell what they call 'the nose' in a wine. That’s also why you will see the flavour of specific wines are often described as “dark coffee’, “chocolate”, “leather”, “blackberry”, or “floral”.

3. SIP AND TASTE

Take half a mouthful and gently squish it around your mouth to make sure the wine touches all your taste buds and swallow it slowly. Our tongues can taste and detect salty, sour, sweet, or bitter.

There are a few aspects to look out for when you sip and taste your wine, includes the taste, texture, and length. We will deep-dive and discuss these aspects, length and texture, in blog posts on another day. There are so many different flavour characteristics in each wine. But hey! Let's not make it too complicated for now.

Don't be shy to take another mouthful, if the first one doesn't satisfy your taste buds. On those first few sips your taste buds are stimulated and triggered and your memory will go back again to sensory experiences such as when you were at school and chewing off your pencil and tasted that wood-like flavour or when you were drinking homemade strawberry juice in hot summer days while running around your parents' backyard with your friends. Or even when you are simply enjoying a box of chocolate during a movie.

You then try to tie these memories to the flavour of the wine you just sipped. This is how you can try to identify the flavour of the wine

4. STOP AND THINK

Let's now revisit the steps above, start with evaluating step number one and identify the colour of the wine, continue on to step number two and think of the scent you get from the wine to tell 'the nose' of the wine, then to final step and think of the dominant flavour that you can taste from the wine.

Also ask yourself a few questions. Did you like the wine? Was the wine memorable and one that you would go back to? If so, what is it from the wine that would make you go back to it? Could it be the lushness of milk-chocolate-like flavour or could it be the richness and oiliness of butter-like flavour.

Truth is, if you like the wine then there is something in it that your senses identify as a familiar taste. And if you don't like the wine then probably it doesn't match or hasn't yet matched your palate.

And if we could sum it up for you...

No one else knows your palate better than you so if you do these 4 simple steps you will master your wine choice (at least for yourself). If you want to better it and become a bit more of a pro, you can always practise this by taking notes of each step from the wine you have at hand and compare it by researching and reading the wine's characteristics. You will be surprised at how your memory provides a way to remember and describe the wines you are tasting.

Click here to discover your wine today.

Happy Tasting!

Lots of Love,

BGW.