When you are around friends and family members who enjoy wine, do you understand the foreign language they use, such as:
- Bouquet – the scent of aromatic wine
- Body – whether a wine is light, medium, or full
- Finish – how a wine tastes after you swallow it
- Soft – a wine that tastes smooth
- Tannic – Red wine that leaves a pleasant dry taste
Even if you are a neophyte in wine tasting, remember that not everyone knows everything about wines. There is no harm in asking professional sommelier about choosing the right wine for your enjoyment. Remember that a majority of the wines on the market today are not just affordable, but they are all good. You can hardly make a tasting mistake!
To help you identify wine varieties, you can learn about identifying its appearance, smelling it, and then tasting it. To help give you a leg up on how to taste wine, here are five expert wine tasting tips:
1. Wine Appearance
You look at wine to gauge its colour. For example, with white wine, there are varying shades. Is there a light yellowing, yet with clarity? Light wines represent its contact with grape skins This stands for a light refreshing taste. If your white wine has a deeper yellowish hue, it represents a fuller, smoother, and richer taste
The appearance of red wines is similar to white wine. Tilt your glass and look at its shading. If your red wine looks closer to a pinkish colouring, then it represents a light but tart taste. If your red wine is darker in colour, it represents a rich and bold taste. You would enjoy it with a nice thick steak. Red wines are fermented in their own skin. It is a variety of wine that contains more tannin than white wines. The more tannin a wine has, the dryer your mouth will feel after you drink it.
2. Let’s Smell The Wine
Many people don’t believe that they will be smart or experienced enough to detect a wine’s aroma. Identifying your wine’s aromatic scent or “bouquet” is a simple practice that will eventually come to you. First, you must swirl a small amount of wine if your glass. The purpose of swirling enables the wine aroma to vaporise allowing the wine to become more pungent.
Bring the glass to your nose and smell the wine. Wine scents are varied, i.e., mild, fruity, woodsy, mild, herbal, vanilla, toasty, floral, and more. Wait just a moment and see what you pick up. If you are in the presence of other wine tasters, listen to what their nose picks up. Bring your glass to your nose again and see if you smell the descriptive aroma.
3. Tasting or Sipping
After you have looked at the wine’s appearance, you have smelled it, now you can taste it. Tasting does not mean to take a gulp and that’s it. Wines have many types of subtle flavours.
The following tasting steps should only take a few seconds once you become more familiar with the process:
- Take a sip in your mouth
- Do not swallow
- Hold the wine in your mouth
- Purse your lips allowing air to enter and surround the wine
- Swish the wine around in your mouth
- Swallow the wine
Remember, the tongue can distinguish between spicy, sourness, sweetness, and thousands of other flavours. When you are tasting the wine your taste buds will let you know what it tastes like.
After completing this wine enjoyment process, do you like the wine?
4. Savour
When you finally swallow a wine’s deliciousness, the final experience and taste of the wine can be different from your palate taste. In creating a wine, there is no alcohol involved. Therefore, you should not taste any alcohol in the process. You should only taste the natural or organic wine flavouring that can last for several minutes on the palate. It is this length of flavouring on your palate that makes certain wines stand out.
5. Wine Packaging
You can purchase wine whose packaging makes it a souvenir. Wine is now packaged in a box, in a jug, a can, individual cups, or covered with the dirt that the grapes came from. The packaging of wine has become a designer’s delight whose labelling looks like it came from an art museum or a clothing designer. Even professional wine tasters and critics support the existence of wine packaging.
No matter whether you learn to enjoy Chardonnay, Cabernet, Pinot Grigio, or a Pinot Noir, your modern-day wines are packaged very interestingly However, it is still all about sustainability and taste.
There are expirations for wine no matter how it is packaged. Therefore, enjoy the best in wine flavours, no matter how it is packaged.