We have seen this with our own eyes at a recent wine tasting–completely flabbergasting–a supposedly high-end wine shop in Palatine is now carrying a “chocolate wine”!!!

Holy Cow!

We have it from the rumor mill that boxed wine from Gallo and liter bottles of Ripple are the next acquisitions.  Way to make a high-end wine shop into a 7-11

Wine Tasting Etiquette

During a wine tasting, should I spit or swallow the wine? It depends. If you are tasting a lot of wine, you should probably spit so you can truly appreciate the taste of the wine rather than the effect of it. If you are only tasting a couple of vintages it would be a shame to waste it.

Final Thoughts

A few more points to remember:

• No smoking
• No perfume or cologne
• No table talk let everyone finish the tasting before expressing your opinion.

Some simple rules:

• Champagne should be nicely chilled before opening; cold keeps the gasses in the bottle more compressed.
• Holding the bottle with your left hand, grasp the cork and the mouth of the bottle with your right and twist gently. The cork should begin to slide out and make a gentle pop as it escapes.
• Now by the light of a full moon on New Year’s Eve, plant the cork (it is cork, isn’t it?) and see if you can’t grow another bottle by 2011.

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.

Most wine experts just follow a set of rules when they taste wine and write reviews.

The Process

The process to follow whenever you taste wine whether it be in the comfort of your own home, at a winery, or even at a restaurant is:

The 5 S’s. Which are: See, Swirl, Smell, Sip, Savor.

See - Basically note the color of the wine. Put the glass on a angle, against a light back ground if possible. As a general rule, heavier wines will be deeper in color.

Swirl - I’m sure everyone has seen this done a myriad of times. If you are a beginner and find it really hard to swirl fluently – place the glass on the table, hold it at its stem and make small circles on the table. This is the cheats way to get nice swirl.

The swirl has two main purposes. 1. Allow the wine to breath, which opens up the smell and taste of the wine and 2. To see how viscous the wine is by the “legs” that will run back down the side of the glass.

Smell - pretty self explanatory. I won’t get into too much detail here, but this should be about enjoying the scent of the wine.

Sip - Finally, we get to drinking hey? It is a good idea to hold it in your mouth for a few seconds, to allow your taste buds to fully absorb the flavor. During this step you are basically trying to govern the texture, flavors and weight of the wine.

Savor - This step basically is to explain/note the aftertaste that you get of the wine.

If this process is new to you, depending on who your drinking the wine with, it is probably best to stick to very broad and generic terms when describing both the smell and taste of the wine.

Things such as: “fruity”, “sweet”, “dry”, “strong” (heavy), “smooth”, even things like “nice” or ” not very nice” still will give perception that you have done it before.

At the end of the day, If you don’t think the wine is nice and drinkable it does not matter what an expert has once said about the wine. So don’t be afraid to have confidence in your own palate.

If you feel like getting adventurous. There are actually some tools which can help you in the tasting description process.

A really handy tool when learning a lot of the descriptors of wine is the Aroma Wheel. This really simplifies the your description database.

Also, check out here for an extensive list of common descriptors and what they mean when they are used in wine circles and on the back of labels. Finally some sense to the descriptions on the back of bottles!

Take Action

Next time you have some wine, whether it is at home, at a friends place or in a restaurant, remember the 5 S’s and go through the process. Remember to take your time going through the process even if your friends don’t. They will be asking you questions in no time, which is never a bad thing. Taking time is the key, which will allow you to consciously taste the wine and remember it in the future.

1. Randolph Wine Cellars – 1415 W Randolph St, Chicago, IL

2. Pops For Champagne – 601 N State St, Chicago, IL

3. In Fine Spirits – 5420 N Clark St, Chicago, IL

4. Bin 36 – 339 N Dearborn St, Chicago, IL

5. Bluebird – 1749 N Damen Ave, Chicago, IL

6. Doc Wine Bar – 326 Yorktown Ctr, Lombard, IL

RIP

Sam’s Wines & Spirits, locked in a decades-long rivalry with Skokie-based Binny’s Beverage Depot, ended with news that Binny’s is buying Sam’s. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Chicago Tribune first reported the sale late Thursday.

“It makes sense for them to try and create a unified chain,” said Neil Stern, a partner at Chicago retail consultancy McMillan Doolittle LLP. “Both had been trying to expand, but the evidence is out there that Binny’s had been more successful in expanding its footprint.”

Binny’s had $200 million in revenue in fiscal 2008 and has doubled in size to 22 locations over the last nine years. Its strategy has mixed opening new shops with buying smaller rivals, including Willowbrook-based DiCarlo’s Armanetti Fine Wines & Liquors in 2005 and Zimmerman’s Liquors on the Near North Side in 2000.

Sam’s, which had $65 million in 2008 sales, is down to two stores: its original location in Lincoln Park and a shop in Downers Grove. Both will be converted to Binny’s, sources said. Sam’s closed its South Loop location in August and its Highland Park store last month.

The two family businesses, which in the early 1990s talked briefly of merging, have been rivals since both were founded in the 1940s. Over the years they’ve both seen increased competition from other retailers like Washington-based Costco, whose deep discounts on wine and booze lure many price-conscious consumers, especially during a recession.