All About Wine And Its Goodness!

Tasting wine is what we’ll be looking at in this part of our wine 101 guide…

When it comes to tasting wine, there are three aspects: smell, taste, and finish. We’ll look at each of those individually.

Swirling your wine in your glass is the first step to smelling it; this process exposes the most amount of the wine to air, which helps release its aromas. To swirl effectively, don’t fill the glass too full – in fact less than half full is recommended. As you’re swirling, place your nose in the glass, inhale, and think about what aromas are coming up from the glass as you do so. Young wines will have primary aromas, relating to the grape variety (such smells are often fruit related). As wines age more secondary aromas develop, which may be more earthy or animalistic. Remember that a wines aromas can take on many different forms, and very rarely will it simply smell of grapes.

When you taste wine, it’s important to realize that little of the flavor that can be sensed actually involves the tongue. In fact, its your nose that does the tasting, even when wine is in your mouth; this is because the aromas of the wine seep into your nasal passages from your mouth. So, breathe in and out through your nose whilst the wine is in your mouth; paying attention to the way the wine changes as you hold it there. Your first impressions on taking the wine into your mouth may be referred to as the fore-palate, which are followed by the mid-palate and the end-palate. Each palate sensation will be different, and you’ll be able to sense these changes if you pay close attention.

When you swallow wine, you experience the finish. It will often be different to how the wine came across on the palate. You might notice the wines flavors remaining on your palate after you swallow, and this feeling is called length. The more length a wine has, the more time you have to enjoy it, and it’s probably true to say that such wines are generally of better quality.

Tags: how to taste wine, tasting wine, wine, wine tasting

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 4th, 2009 at 5:34 am and is filed under food and wine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.