Oct 27 2009
How to Buy Wine
If you’re a wine lover and would like to get to know more about this complex and popular beverage, there’s no better way to broaden your horizons than by learning the fine art of wine tasting. For a richer experience, you’ll want to do more than simply pour wine into a glass and sip it. Although it may seem complicated and that you have to be an expert to understand wine tasting, with a little practice, you’ll deepen your appreciation for this multi-faceted beverage and the people who make it in no time.
Appearance
When learning about a wine, the first thing you want to assess is how it looks. To get started, look at the wine in the right light—anything but fluorescent should work—against a neutral-colored or white background.
Tilt your glass away from you until it’s at a 45-degree angle so you can see the width and hue of the wine’s ”rim.” Set the glass down and look at the wine from above to examine its clarity, brightness, and depth of color. Check to see if the wine has any bubbles or foreign bodies.
The wine should be bright and clear and not hazy or cloudy and its color should be rich and full. If the wine has a hazy or cloudy appearance, it could contain contamination or sediment that have been shaken up in the bottle. With older red wines, deposits do tend to accumulate over the years, but the sediment should stay in the bottle. Any sediment that shows up in the glass will obscure the taste, texture, and appearance of the wine. Sediment is less common in white wine, but it can still be there. This means that it has never been over-filtered. Small, colorless crystals at the bottom of a glass of white wine are harmless deposits, and are a sign that the wine has not been over-treated.
In Glass
When trying to discern the wine’s flavor “notes,” your nose knows best, which is why you’ll smell the wine before you taste it. There are even special glasses that many people use for wine tasting that have large bowls and a tapered opening. This helps to capture more of the aroma within the glass to enable the taster detect them. Wines served at a warmer temperature will reveal more of the aroma, and swirling (also called aerating) the wine helps to move the aroma up to the nose more quickly. However, it’s usually best to give the wine a small sniff before swirling in case there are stronger aromatics that could dominate the lighter notes once the wine is swirled.
Don’t be afraid to get your nose close to the wine, even getting it right inside the glass. This gives you the best opportunity to fully capture all the aromatics. Take a few short, quick sniffs rather than a long inhale. This also helps to better detect the various notes. Take a little break between sniffs because the human nose begins to tire after six seconds or so.
In Mouth
After the nasal inspection of the swirl, you’re ready to taste the wine. Begin with a small sip and let it roll around your tongue. Once you get that first mouthful, you want to think about the first impression you get from the wine.
Once you get yourself accustomed to the taste, you can start looking for all those hidden complexities. This is the time you should start looking for the actual flavor of the wine. In the case of red wines, you may begin to taste the type of fruit in the wine; sometimes, you may even detect the flavors of more than one fruit. You should also begin trying to see if you can detect any spices or woody notes such as oak or cedar. If you’re tasting a white wine, you should also begin to detect the flavors of fruit and you may even taste floral undertones. Some white wines also contain honey, butter, or herbs, so see if you can taste these flavors also.
Now that you’ve sniffed, swirled, and sipped, you might want to write down a few notes about your experience and what you learned. If you’re tasting with friends, compare notes with them. This will help you think of aspects of the tasting that you might have missed on your own, and make for a richer experience overall. Think about the kind of food this wine would taste best with and maybe you could host a wine-tasting party for your friends. Everyone could bring a different type of wine, and you could supply the cheese and bread.
