A Matter of Taste Print
Sunday, 28 January 2007
Everybody who drinks alcohol drinks wine.  But not everybody who drinks wine tastes wine. 

What's the difference? 

People who drink wine do so to meet a need.  To cure thirst, to get drunk, to wash down a meal.  People who taste wine are exploring. A wine taster knows, or at least hopes, that the wine in his or her glass will packed with experiences, with every taste being a whole new journey.

If up until now you have been a wine drinker, not taster, try an experiment. Pour yourself a glass of wine, only an ounce or two, and have a sip. Write down your impressions of the wine.  Then keeping reading.  Don't worry, we'll get back to the wine in a minute.

The word "tasting", as applied to wine, is a bit of a misnomer, since wine tasting involves much more of than simply using your taste buds. Tasting wine involves four of your five senses: vision, smell, touch, and taste.

Pick up your glass of wine and look at it.  But don't just look at it.  Tilt the glass, hold it over a white piece of paper, and look right through it.  What colours do you see?  Red or white, of course, but be more specific.  If it is red, what shade of red?  Perhaps it is more purple than red, or maybe there is a touch of brown?  Is it pale and easy to see through, or is it dark and opaque? If it is white, maybe it is really straw yellow or pale gold, with a touch of green.

Looking closely at the colour of a wine tells you a surprising amount of information:

  • Age: Red wines get paler and browner with age.  Whites get darker and more golden.
  • Grape: Different grapes have different colour characteristics.  For example, red wine made from Pinot Noir is often pale in colour.  White wine made from Pinot Gris often has a tinge of orange.
  • Climate: Not always accurate, but a warm and wet growing season can lead to paler, less intense wines while a hot a dry season can lead to darker, more intensely coloured wines.

The next step of tasting wine is to smell the wine.  Go ahead, take a sniff.  Come on, get your nose right in there.  The smell is not coming to you, you know.  You have to go get it.  Now that you've had an initial sniff, or nose, of the wine, swirl it in your glass.  Grasp the glass firmly by the stem (or, if you want to look really classy, by the base) and move it quickly in small circular motions. After swirling the wine for a few seconds, being careful not to spill, take another sniff. You should notice a big difference.

By swirling a wine you are aerating the wine, exposing more surface of the wine to air, to draw out more of the aroma (or the bouquet) of the wine. This is, by the way, the reason why good wine glasses curve inward toward to rim.  The inward curve helps to trap the bouquet in the glass, concentrating the aromas for your smelling pleasure. 

Of all the technique of wine tasting, swirling is the most powerful.  It makes such a noticeable difference to the tasting experience that new connoisseurs of wine tasting often start swirling pop, juice, milk, whatever.  If you find yourself in a restaurant swirling your water glass, you've probably gone too far.

I briefly touched upon the subject of "good wine glasses," I should briefly explain the unfortunate truth that wine glasses do make a difference.  In a pinch, a bad wine glass is better than no glass at all.  But those glasses that are round like a tennis ball with its top cut off are better off in your next garage sale than on your dinner table.  A good wine glass should have a bowl that is taller than it is wide so that the wine has lots of room in which to swirl and breath.  A thinner edge also enhances the perception of the wine.  Crystal manufacturers, such as Riedel (who was the first to recognize the importance of wine glass shape on the perception of a wine), sell dozens of styles of wine glasses that are optimized for every type of wine imaginable.  It all sounds like a bunch of marketing hooey, but if you ever attend a wine glass tasting, where you try the same wine from various styles of wine glasses, you will come away amazed.

The effect of the wine glass on the perception of a wine throws a big wrench into the practice of wine tasting.  If the same wine tasted in two different glasses can taste completely different, how on earth can we compare two different wines tasted in different glasses.  To eliminate the wine glass variable, the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) stepped in with the ISO wine tasting glass.  This glass is supposed to represent the optimum size and shape to best evaluate the characteristics of a wine.  Opinions vary, and you often see hard-nosed wine-o-philes toting around their own favourite Riedel glass at a wine show.  I happen the like the the ISO wine tasting glass quite a bit, and often use it as an everyday drinking glass.

Let's get back to your wine.  You were just swirling and sniffing, and probably smelling a lot more than you can describe. Welcome to one of the main difficulties of wine tasting.  Not perception, though that can be problematic, but description. You've used swirling to unlock the bouquet of the wine, and you are picking up more more aromas than you ever have before, and when you try and put words to what you smell all you can come up with is "it smells like wine." There are two tools you must adopt to solve this difficulty: practice and the wine aroma wheel.

Practice is simple: smell everything.  When you are cooking, smell the individual ingredients.  When you are grocery shopping, smell the produce (this sometimes bring odd looks in the grocery store).  Smell you clothes, smell your wallet, smell your pets, smell, smell, smell. By practicing your smelling your are not trying to discover new smells.  You are trying to put words to smells, so when you come across that smell later on the description of the smell comes right off the tip of your tongue.

The wine aroma wheel, developed by Dr. Anne Noble a the University of California at Davis, is a great tool help beginners and experienced wine tasters follow their noses to the right descriptors.  The wine aroma wheel takes the descriptors for the aromas most often associated with wine and wraps them in a circle.  Starting at the centre, you work your way out to the correct descriptor.  For example, take your "smells like wine" assessment and go one step more specific.  Is the aroma vegetative? Nutty? Fruity? You say fruity?  Now go one more step more specific.  Is it citrus, berry, tropical fruit, tree fruit.  You say tropical?  Now go one more step.  Is it pineapple, melon, or banana. Pineapple, you say?  Congratulations!  You've gone from "smells like wine" to "pineapple" in less than 60 seconds. You can order an authentic wine aroma wheel from winearomawheel.com, though a Google search will probably turn up a fair copy.

Now, finally, we are going to taste the wine.  There are people who will argue that tasting is superfluous.  After all, the sense of taste is relatively feeble.  The average person can detect thousands of different aromas, but only five basic tastes.  But really, who cares?  Putting the wine in your mouth is the fun part.  It's what tasting is all about.

When you are drinking wine, you take a sip and the wine flows over your tongue.  Then you swallow and it's gone.  Tasting wine less elegant.  You take a sip and then you chew it.  You swish the wine around your mouth, getting it in and out of your cheeks and around your teeth, almost like it is mouthwash (but don't gargle).  This gets every nuance of taste and feel out of the wine.  Then, while the wine is still in your mouth, you pucker your lips and draw in some air.  If you do it right you will make a rude sort of burbling sound, and if you do it wrong you will dribble wine down your chin.  What you are doing is aerating the wine in you mouth, drawing air through the wine and up into your nasal passages.  This lets you leverage your sense of smell to prop up your puny sense of taste.

When evaluating a wine in my mouth, I try to break the sensation down using following characteristics: sweet, acid (sour), bitter, tannin, and body.  Note that only three of these, sweet, sour, and bitter, are tastes.  The other two are sensations related to your sense of touch, or mouth feel.  Consider the following, one at a time:

  • Sweetness: Generally, sweet mean sugar.  Not always though. Alcohol, for one, is perceived as sweet.  So a sweet tasting wine might indicate a wine with high alcohol content. This is one of the many reasons why wines with high alcohol content are so popular.

  • Acidity (or Sourness): There a three main acids found in wine: tartaric, malic, and citric.  You know they are there when the wine feels crisp and makes your mouth water.  Some acid is desirable in wine.  A wine without acid tastes flat and boring.  Acid is also a good preservative, which helps a wine age.  Too much acid, however, is unpleasant and is generally considered a flaw.

  • Bitterness: At first glance the description "bitter" sounds negative, but bitter tastes often enhance a wine and make it more interesting.  We don't want, of course, an overwhelming I-want-to-spit-it-out bitterness. A little bit of bitterness can be a good balance to acidity.

  • Body: The body is a measure of the fullness or weight of the wine. To get an understanding of body, imagine a mouthful of water compared to a mouthful of 2% milk and to a mouthful of cream.  The water is light or not full, the cream is heavy or full, and the 2% is somewhere in between. 

  • Tannins: Tannins are chemical compounds that comes predominantly from the skins of grape.  Tannins are also found in grape seeds and stems, but these generally do not make it into the wine.  When making red wines, the wine sits around for a time on the skins of the crushed grapes.  This gives the wine its colour, and also most of it's tannins, which is why tannins are a factor only in red wines (with a few exceptions).  Most people find tannins unpleasant.  A lot of tannins makes your teeth stick to your lips, and makes your tongue and cheeks feel furry.  If you are not sure what tannins feels like, drink some black tea that has been steeping for an hour, or eat a banana peel.  You won't like it, but trust me you will never forget what it feels like.  Tannins act as a preservative, and soften slowly over time.  This is the basis of the age-ability of red wines.  A fine red wine that has rip-your-tongue-out tannins when young can become quite pleasant after 5, 10, 20 or more years, after the tannins have softened or dropped out of the wine.  Tannins are also a good match with some foods.  A highly tannic wine goes well with rare steak and hard cheeses.

But what does the wine taste like? I've been blathering on about sweet, sour, bitter, body, and tannin, but I haven't once mentioned apples or strawberries or any other tastes.  That's because those aren't tastes.  Look at the five basic tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, salt, and savoury (commonly called umami).  Do you see apple in there anywhere?  What about strawberry?  I thought not.  What we perceive as tastes are really tastes and sensations combined with smells.  An apple tastes sweet and acidic, and has a recognizable feel in the mouth, but remove the apple smell and it becomes indistinguishable from a raw potato.

All good things come to an end, and tasting wine is no exception. For wine, however, the end is known as the finish, and is a description of how long the sensation of the wine remains in your mouth after you have swallowed it (or spit it out, if your are going to be driving somewhere soon).  The finish is generally described in qualitative terms such as short, medium, or long.  There is no precise definition of short, medium, and long, so put away your stopwatch. If the sensation is gone before, say, you've completed a couple of breaths, that would be a short finish. If the sensation is still lingering in your mouth after you have put the wine glass down, thought about it, and jotted a few tasting notes, then it is a long finish.  As for a medium finish, you get to decide that for yourself.

Now that you have had your first real taste of wine, let's recap what just happened. You looked at the colour of the wine, then you sniffed it, swirled it, and sniffed it again to get the bouquet. After that you took a sip and chewed it and slurped it to get the most out of the taste sensation, and then you swallowed it or spit it out. And finally you sat around and waited for the sensation to finish. You've done it once. Now do it all again, but this time record your impressions on a piece of paper. Compare those impressions to those you recorded at the top of this article. See a difference?  I know I saw a big difference the time I learned to taste wine.

Congratulations! You have taken the first step in the journey towards wine appreciation. The next step is to taste some more, and the step after that is to taste some more again, and repeat as desired. The more wine you taste, the more you will refine your appreciation for wine and your ability to describe the aromas and sensations experienced while tasting. At the same time you will also refine your appreciation of food, for food and wine go hand in hand.

You will also probably increase the amount of money you spend on wine. Like an athlete learning a new sport and constantly moving up to better equipment, you will find that you will always want to move up to better, and usually more expensive, wines. That's the price you pay, unfortunately, for wine appreciation.

I think it's worth it.