Wine Basics
How to taste wine like a pro
Being a young wine student, I’ve found myself in the fascinating world of wine and had to learn how to taste wine in a way that allowed me to be aware all the different flavours and textures that may be present.
You’ve probably seen wine professionals suck, slurp and spit their way through a wine tasting but is that really how you’re supposed to do it? You can learn how to taste wine in a simple way which will not only make you sound like you know what you’re talking about but also will help widen your wine knowledge.
So how do I go about it?
Before a wine tasting, it is important to prepare yourself so you can get a clear impression that isn’t affected by any external factors. This includes using a wine glass that’s clear and clean. No dirty glasses here, people!
Make sure you have a big enough spittoon if you are going to be doing a lot of tasting, or at least somewhere to pour out the wine out as you move on to the next glass. The last thing you want is an overflowing wine glass filled with saliva to accidentally spill . . . I’ll stop there because I think you get the point. Although spitting out the wine may seem like a waste, it allows you to assess what it’s like without getting drunk.
You also need to make sure the room is well lit as well as odour-free (you shouldn’t wear perfume or cologne either). And if you smoke make sure you take a cigarette break well before the start of the session.
Having some plain crackers on the side is also a good option because they can help cleanse your palate between wines. And you’ll need water to keep you hydrated.
Make sure the wine is at the correct temperature too because this will also affect the taste, so chill any white wine or rosé.
How the wine looks:
Now to the wine. The first thing you do when you pour get a glass of wine is look at it. After pouring your glass of wine, tilting the glass at an angle will help you appreciate the wine’s true colour. (It helps to hold the glass against a white or light background or a piece of white paper.
By looking right into the wine glass, you can see how intense the colour is, is it pale, deep or somewhere in the middle? Older reds sometimes fade towards the edge of the glass
But how do you describe that colour that you see? Well white wines can range from a pale straw colour all the way to deep gold and even amber. For reds, it can go from a light cherry colour to almost purple. And rosé? From pale whisper pink to salmon to orange! Great, isn’t it?
How the wine smells:
Now to the ‘nose’ which is how wine pros refer to the smell of a wine. Sniffing a wine can tell you so much about what’s going on in the glass, from the wine’s age to the different techniques that could have been used during the making. (No, I don’t expect you to get that - yet!). And if you can’t smell - because you have a cold for example - you can’t really taste anything either.
Stick your nose into the glass and inhale all those lovely aromas. To get a more complete picture, swirl the glass and then place you palm over the glass for around 4-6 seconds, slowly lift you hand up, sniff again and notice the difference.
What are you getting? At first, you might just think ‘wine’, but that’s okay. Try and link the smells to things you’re more familiar with. Is it fresh strawberries, green apples or deeper aromas like vanilla and chocolate that might hint that the wine has been aged in oak? And how intense are these aromas; light so that you’re ust getting a whiff of them or so intense they’re really hitting you in the face?
What if there are any unpleasant smells?
If the wine smells like soggy cardboard or wet dog, or comes across as stale or musty, there is a chance that the wine may be corked which means it’s faulty not that it has little bits of cork floating in it. Obviously that isn’t likely to happen in a wine that’s sealed with a screwcap but even they can smell a bit funky at times. Give it a moment or two then swirl it again.
(Pro Tip: If you aren’t really smelling anything anymore and are finding it a bit hard, smell your wrist to bring everything back to normal and go in for another sniff)
How the wine tastes:
The fun part has come… tasting the wine. Swirl a small sip around your mouth and ping it around your taste buds for a few seconds (you can spit the wine into your spittoon or swallow).
How does it feel in your mouth? Is it light and refreshing like water or rich and almost viscous? That’s the body of the wine. Does it strike you as sweet? If not, the wine is ‘dry’, if there’s a touch of sweetness or ‘residual sugar’, it may be labelled as ‘off-dry’ or ‘medium-dry’ or, if it’s sweeter still, ‘medium-sweet’. Or if it’s really sweet you’re talking about a dessert wine.
Can you taste the acidity in this wine, i.e. is it sharp? Does it make your mouth water? Does it have any tannins (that’s mainly reds, although white wines like oaked chardonnay can also contain tannin), if so, how obvious are they? A tannic wine leaves a rough, drying sensation in your mouth like drinking a strong cup of black tea.
Is the wine so high in alcohol (more than 14%) you can almost feel the burn in your mouth or on the lower side (under 12%)? All of these factors can give you an idea of the quality of the wine; in a good wine all these things should be in balance. But we won’t stop there…
Flavours! What do you taste? Is it intense? You can take another sip if you need a reminder, I’ll wait.
Just like when we were smelling the wine, are there any flavours that are familiar? If it’s a white wine, are you getting green fruits like green apple, pear, gooseberry? Or can you taste citrus; lemon and limes? Maybe even tropical fruits like mango, and pineapple. What about honey, toast and even petrol? For red wine, are you getting dried fruits like raisins and prunes, fresh berries like cranberry and raspberry or cooked fruits like blackberry and dark plum? Some spices, smoke, or leather even? There’s a whole range of descriptions you can use - just jot down or anything that comes to mind.
Lastly, how long does the flavour last in your mouth after you’ve swallowed or spat it out? This is called the finish and can go from ‘short’ (the flavours disappear quickly) to ‘long’ (the taste lingers which is good unless the wine is bad).
Can the same glass of wine taste different?
As the wine warms up in the glass, the flavours of the wine evolve so take another sip. Can you notice the difference.?
Now play a little trick on yourself. Taste the wine then take a bite of a sharp, juicy apple and see how it changes the taste of the wine. Or nibble a bit of cheese. How does the wine taste now?
So now you can come to a conclusion about this wine; was it well-balanced? Were the aromas and flavours complex or was it a simple wine? Is it the sort of wine that needs to be aged or did it seem to you just the right time to drink it? These are all things to take into account when arriving at your conclusion. And, most important of all did you like the wine!
Now you know how to taste wine like a pro! And don’t forget… practice, practice, practice! This will help you identify different flavours and aromas as well as broaden your wine knowledge by tasting different wines AND it’s lots of fun!
Just to give you a bit of a steer here are some flavours to look out for in:
- Sauvignon Blanc – lemon and grapefruit, passionfruit, gooseberry and sometimes green bean or asparagus
- Chardonnay can range from green apple and lemon to peach, mango and vanilla
- Riesling – green apple, lime, white blossom and sometimes a slight oiliness, even petrol
- Pinot Noir –, raspberry, strawberry, red and black cherry, plum
- Malbec – plum, blackberry, sometimes a slightly smokey note
- Champagne – ranges from crisp citrus to honey, nuts and toast, depending on age
Natalie Agyapong is a 20 year old second year BSc Wine Production student at Plumpton College. You can also find her on tiktok at learnaboutwinewithme
How to create a modest wine cellar on a budget
You don't have to have a luxury apartment to have a wine cellar argues Peter Pharos. Here's how he did it on a budget.
"One Hyde Park appears to have been built with the explicit intention of accumulating reasons to dislike the 0.01%. In the city with the smallest living spaces in Europe, it has apartments so big that architects didn’t know how to fill them. Its services are fit for a Bond villain, from catering by Heston and Daniel, to SAS-trained 24-hour security. However, when one of its penthouses recently made the news, the Guardian’s eye was drawn to…its two wine cellars.
Which was great: I am used to being in distinctly non-tycoon territory, but it appeared that this time I was right up there with the jet-set. You see, I have not two, but three wine cellars, of sorts anyway. Put together, they set me back about fifteen hundred quid.
In common with many others, my first foray in wine storage was a cheap wine fridge. It did its job fine temperature-wise and looked rather sleek, but I never managed to get the humidity right and around the four-year mark I would see the odd cork drying out.
Next came a DIY solution: a big old broken fridge. I removed the motor, put it in a rarely-lit room, and filled the door shelves with ice in plastic water bottles. Storage conditions-wise, this worked liked a charm, with temperature at a constant 14 °C and humidity at around 70%. However, it did require me to change the water bottles every few days; not undoable, but after a while it felt like having a very stationary pet.
A proper solution had to be found as, once you start collecting wine, you end up with much more of it than you thought you would. It’s unsurprising in a way: you get all the fun of looking, thinking, and choosing wine, but none of the guilt of actually drinking it.
As both a nomad and a perpetual flat-dweller, I did not have the space in any abode of mine, so I appropriated a thin sliver of a room in my parents’ house. After a fair amount of DIY (embarrassingly, little of it mine – cheers Dad!) and the installation of an air conditioning unit, my dream cellar was ready.
Is it worth having a wine cellar anyway?
Why bother have a wine cellar in the first place though? After all, the real subtext of the Guardian’s piece is not that a wine cellar is expensive per se, but that laying down wine is an inherently posh activity. As people that deal with the business of wine never cease to remind us, the vast majority of wine is bought to be consumed immediately, at times quasi-literally so.
As wine writers often observe, even venerable wines associated with long ageing now seem to be made in a more approachable style. Surely ageing wine is something intended for prestige bottles? And given the unhinged prices of said bottles, surely that’s the sort of sport best reserved for One Hyde Park?
Actually, no. I didn’t start a cellar to age my non-existent Pauillac collection. I started it to lay down reasonably-priced bottles that could go the distance. And I didn’t start it so it pays off twenty years later, but as early as three – which it duly did. It is actually the other way around: if you can afford to buy a couple of cases of Latour every year, you can probably afford to pay for professional storage. It’s the wine drinker of more modest means that gains from a home cellar, as “ordinary” wines are transformed into something elegant, different, and, at times, startling.
It is unfortunate, but I rarely get to see my main cellar these days; it is like I broke up with Greece, and she kept the wines in the divorce. But I’m hooked on laying wine down, wherever I can. I even have a mini wine cellar in my in-laws’ house: a shelf I have occupied in their basement. Their daughter has been equally understanding in letting me invest in a mid-range wine fridge in our apartment. This second wine fridge claims to control humidity - I’ll keep you updated.
Five wine styles that benefit from ageing
Red Bordeaux
The legend of red Bordeaux is built, of course, on its long-lived elite, with top examples from good years approaching their peak two decades in and, I hear, staying in drinking form well into their 40s and 50s. Correspondingly, the prices these fetch nowadays are in millionaire territory. What is often missed in all the first growth talk, however, is the pleasure that can be had from much more reasonably priced examples, for those with appropriate patience. Earlier this year I enjoyed a 2005 Chateau La Garde, which was drinking beautifully and had echoes of a much pricier bottle, sufficiently so that I did not regret at all the £50+ I had to shell out for it. But the 2016 I am now eyeing costs less than half of that en primeur.
Alsace whites
Wine people often lament the fact that the general population doesn’t appreciate Riesling enough, which I guess places me squarely amongst the hoi polloi. A Riesling only works for me when it’s at least very good - and has a few years on its back. I am much keener on Alsatian Pinot Gris, but similarly enthusiastic about letting it take a nap in the cellar. The Wine Society stocks the 2015 Réserve bottlings of both Riesling and Pinot Gris from Alsace stalwart Trimbach and, while I agree with them about the longevity of the former, I am almost equally confident about the latter. They say drink until 2021 – I think this is when it will have just reached peak. Not bad for £16 a bottle.
Chianti Classico
Perhaps it’s the iconic packaging, but often questionable content, of the fiasco in the straw basket that makes many people think that Chianti is to be consumed on the day of purchase. In reality, even mid-priced examples from a good vintage such as 2015 or 2016, tend to deliver best five to six years in. I find Castello di Volpaia, at only £12 from Italvinus, offers good value-for-money. If you want to take a step up, Isole e Olena, Castello di Ama, and Fontodi will start entering peak at 2021, and will all easily go at least a decade – more for Fontodi, a wine built to last.
Rioja
Practically unique in the world of wine, traditional Rioja winemakers release their wines only when they are considered ready to drink, lest their unaware customers commit vinous infanticide. This is no small feat given that this usually means at least ten years and comes at no negligent cost to the producer. Ready to drink though does not mean peak: you should not think of the releases as maturity, let alone wise old age, but more like young adulthood. Of course it might not surprise you too much that a serious bottle such as La Rioja Alta’s Viña Ardanza can go the distance, but what about something more modestly priced? Lopez de Heredia’s Viña Cubillo is ready now, but I bet it will be even more enjoyable a few years down the line. I have the bottles to prove I’ve taken that punt – it’s not a risky one to take.
Naoussa
As I wrote above, I didn’t start my cellar to age €100 bottles, but €10 ones, most of these being Naoussa Xinomavro. It’s always remarkable how a wine that starts tannic, rigid, and acidic, mellows into a thing of wonder. I am thinking something like Kir-Yianni’s Ramnista, whose 2015 will just start entering peak in 2025 and will probably still be drinking well into its mid-twenties. But it’s impressive what a few years do even to the most ordinary Xinomavro.
On landing in Athens this summer I was served a bottle of Naoussa Boutari at a family dinner, a Greek staple that retails at around 8-9 euros. It was just over the six year mark, having been kept in a storage room where temperatures in the summer would easily reach the high twenties – a far cry from a proper cellar. But it was mellow and fruity and textured: not a bad result for leaving a simple bottle on a shelf and forgetting about it for a few years."
Which wines do you buy with a view to ageing them and what kind of a cellar do you have?
Peter Pharos likes drinking, talking and writing about the wines of Greece and Italy. He also writes a bimonthly column for timatkin.com.
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