Mar 10 2010
How-To – Wine Tasting; Doing it all using Three Common Senses
In this small how-to article, wine tasting performance relying on the senses primarily used will hopefully be completely taken into knowledge. The primary point of fact is that it isn’t solely the senses of smell and of taste, but the sense of sight certainly does come into play, and is in fact the very first of these three that is put to use in distinguishing the nuances of wines. Let us take into consideration all three of them, beginning right with the first that naturally begins, the sense of sight. There are two major ways to judge wines for both body and clarity by sight, and they are…
In order to discern clarity, we put to good use our sense of sight. How to utilize this in wine tasting is we look through red wines through the side of the glass, perhaps tipping the glass slightly for better judgment – we’re focusing our view upon the edge of the wine’s top surface here. If at the edge it is slightly dark, we can surmise that it is a quite fairly young wine, and inversely, if the clarity of the color shows up to be lighter than the rest, we can then discern that it is an older wine.
As for white wines, we decidedly look down into the wine from above the glass, committing to swirling it about a bit, directing our focus upon the sparkles to judge its clarity. With either red wine or white wine, gently tipping the glass or swirling the wine about in it, look to see if the wine adheres a bit to the inside of the glass as it falls to rest. Some wines won’t attract at all, although the more that it does, the greater the amount of body.
Next in this how-to subject on wine tasting, our enlisting the employment of our sense of smell… “the nose knows”, as the saying goes, and we want to take in the total scent. Swirl your wine about in its glass just a bit, in order to let loose the aroma and then inhale it in deeply, but slowly into your nostrils. Swirled in a mix with the fruitiness or berry-like potions, you may also detect spicy kinds of smells, as well as something inexplicably similar to chocolate – this is a young wine. Older wines smell closer to raisins and prunes.
The ending point to make in this discussion of how-to wine tasting tips is the sense of taste. Two similar senses, taste and smell, are related, so now that you took a snort-full, wet your tongue with the wine, swirl it about within your mouth, possibly even gargling a little. This will wet the back of your throat and sinuses in order that your senses of taste and smell can work as one. If the inside of your mouth retains a dryness of taste, this is in accordance with the tannin content of the wine. You’ll most likely be aware of this more with the darker, deep red wines, most of all.