Wine Tasting 101

…the word ‘tasting’ in relation to wine refers to a deliberate, conscious, and subjective act, the aim of which is to assess the qualities of the wine under review.

Michael Broadbent, Wine Tasting

        The concept of tasting wine suggests a more deliberate, intentional process than merely putting wine in your mouth and swallowing it. Oz Clarke has suggested we should, “think while we drink.” His advice calls to mind how the process of tasting wine requires one’s focused attention, a cognitive activity as well as a gustatory one. He pleads for making the consumption of wine a more intentional act. We can certainly drink wine for the sole purpose of getting a quick buzz and pay little or no attention to what is in the glass, but that would be drinking, not tasting. More on those differences later in this section.

Tasting wine can be as informal as trying an assortment of wines until you decide which ones you like and which ones you don’t, or as complicated as identifying different grape varieties, production methods, and wine elements in a blind tasting exam for the Master Sommelier certificate. Although I agree there is no inherently right or wrong way to taste wine, there are some techniques and considerations that just might make your experiences tasting wine more intentional and attentional, and hopefully, more enjoyable.

    Barry Smith defines the exercise of tasting wine as a matter of individuals engaging in spontaneous judgments in response to what they encounter in their experience. It is a perceptive, as well as a reflective, process. Tasters use their senses, primarily sight, smell, and taste, to engage with a wine and to think about what the senses are offering in that particular context. It’s may be just that simple, and yet wine critics and professionals have worked to make it immensely complex and intimidating at times. 

I agree that better than average wines have lots of flavors, textures, aromas and other things going on in the glass. It is a living, breathing entity, somewhere along its way from grape juice to vinegar. However, experts in the wine profession have made the act of wine tasting so daunting that many people at wine tastings are afraid to say the wrong thing. Many novice tasters who find themselves unable to identify certain elements in a wine choose to avoid wine tasting events or keep all of their ideas and impressions about what is in the glass to themselves. Heaven forbid if someone identifies the presence of oak flavors when there isn’t any, or mistakes a cabernet for a merlot, let alone orders the wrong wine with dinner. I think we need to bring back the enjoyment of tasting wine, simplify the process and the language associated with it, invite more people to explore new styles of wine, and do all of this while respecting the varieties and qualities of the great wines of the world.

My Tasting Process

    Most wine books directed at novice wine drinkers usually offer a series of steps for improving one’s tasting process and making one’s experiences more mindful, and intentional. These steps usually include ideas about how to select proper glassware, the best way to pour wine, tips on smelling wine, and some suggestions about how to analyze the information gathered through one’s senses. In my opinion, the simpler the process, the better. You don’t want to let the process of tasting wine get in the way of enjoying the wine itself. 

I suggest you begin by slowing down and spend some time considering what it is you are going to put in your glass. Will you have someone select the wine for you? Will you know what is in the glass or will you go into the tasting blind? Is the tasting for a specific purpose, such as identifying a particular varietal, region or wine style, or are you just focusing your attention on what you experience in the glass? Are you working on improving your sense of smell to better identify aromas? With these possibilities in mind, here are Seven Simple Steps I have recommended to my friends who are working to improve their tasting techniques and wine experiences:

1.    Preparing – Pour an ounce (about an inch) or less of wine into a stemmed wine glass at the proper temperature. Serving red wine too warm, or white wine too cold can skew your tasting results. I even try and use the same type of wine glass when I am tasting wines to be more consistent in my approach.

2.    Looking – Ask yourself: What color is the wine? Is it light, pale, or deeply colored? Can you see through it, or is it so dense if you held it against the page of a book you could not see any of the words? Is the wine all the same color or does it get lighter near the rim? The visual characteristics, the smell, the color, the taste, the mouthfeel all play an important role in wine tasting. Keep your attention focused on what is in the glass before considering what happens in your mouth.

3.    Smelling – Stick your nose right into the glass and take a deep, short sniff. I like using one nostril then another, so my nose doesn’t get too fatigued too quickly. Take a moment and consider what you smell. Do you smell fruits, vegetables, earth, mushrooms, bread, or flowers? Make a note or two before moving on.

4.    Swirling – Swirl the wine around in the glass and smell it again – getting some oxygen into the wine helps open up the wine and allows for more aromas to leave the glass. Take a look at the sides of the glass. If there are streaks on the side of the glass (sometimes called legs) it may indicate a higher level of alcohol in the wine.

5.    Sipping – Take a small amount of wine into your mouth, swish it around, and then breathe air into your mouth to allow the retronasal sensations to broaden the taste of the wine. What do you taste? Are the tastes similar or different from the things you smelled? Make a few notes about some of the initial tastes you perceive.

6.    Tasting – Wait a bit of time and then take a bit larger sip and swirl it around in your mouth. Consider how it feels. Is it heavy or light? Think about the five primary senses of salt, bitter, sweet, sour, and umami. Do any of these dominate the taste of the wine? Does it still taste the same? What are the elements you taste the second time around?

7.    Analyzing – now is the time to consider the wine as a whole. Is it balanced, complex, thin, too high in alcohol, interesting, bland, or harmonious? Take some notes to help you remember what you have tasted and to help you recall this wine profile the next time you taste a new wine.

You don’t have to follow all these steps exactly every time you taste a wine. However, the more consistent you become in your approach to tasting, the better able you will be to recognize the often nuanced differences between varietals, regions, and styles of wine.

Tasting Grids and Formats

Every wine organization that includes a tasting component as part of their certifying exams includes some sort of tasting grid or method for tasting wines. These grids also come along with an approved lexicon of words that should be used when describing a wine’s characteristics. Most of these tasting grids or deductive tasting formats are divided into things we see, smell, and taste. Many of these grids follow along the same order as my seven simple steps to tasting listed above.

The Court of Master Sommeliers offers a template for their deductive tasting method, while the Wine and Spirit Education Trust invites participants to follow their Systematic Approach to Tasting Wine (SAT). I have provided an example of each in Appendix X. Although there are subtle distinctions between the various approaches, most organizations propose their own tasting systems and associated lexicons or grids as structured frameworks or templates used to arrive at reliable and valid conclusions about the elements, taste, and quality of a wine. 

    Most tasting grids progress through the tasting of a wine in similar fashion, beginning with visually inspecting the wine, smelling it, tasting it, and finishing with an analysis of one’s sensory experiences. In addition, most tasting grids distinguish among primary, secondary, and tertiary flavors. Primary aromas and flavors come from the grapes themselves and the environmental factors involved in the ways the fruit was grown, secondary aromas and flavors are associated with winemaking procedures, fermentation styles, filtering and fining decisions, and the selection of the vessel for vinification, usually stainless steel or oak barrels, while tertiary aromas and flavors come from the effects of aging wine in barrels or bottles. Most wines less than five years old have very few tertiary flavors.

    Tasting grids are designed to help wine drinkers pay close attention to the vast array of elements that are present in a wine. These grids should be used as an observational guide, designed to help tasters play close attention to all the possibilities a wine may offer. These grids should not be seen as a lock-step formula for deriving the final word on what a wine tastes like. There are many factors involved with wine tasting and the grids are simply a tool for enhancing one’s sensory experiences and analyses.

The Smell Box

In the movie French Kiss, the actor Kevin Kline created a “smelling box” that included many herbs and natural scents to be used to help Meg Ryan appreciate the nuanced differences between lavender and other smells in the wines his family produced. In fact, there are “aroma kits” you can buy that are specially designed to enhance one’s ability to identify particular aromas that occur in many well-known wines. My wife purchased a smelling kit for me while I was studying for my Certified Sommelier degree called, Le Nez Du Vin. In English, that literally translates as “the nose of wine.” The kit includes 54 little bottles of liquids that give off many of the most commonly identified aromas found in wines. The idea is to be able to pick up any bottle at random and identify what the smell might be, then check your ideas against the list of aromas included in the manual.

These smelling boxes are quite expensive, and I probably would not have purchased one if my lovely wife had not given me one as a gift. I have to admit that using the smelling box did help me identify many of the aromas I needed to identify when tasting wines. Bianca Bosker in Cork Dork also wrote about using one of these kits to help hone her sense of smell as she prepared for her wine tasting sessions and certificate exams. Not sure if these kits are actually all that helpful for the average wine drinker but they certainly are fun to play with and can be used as a nice parlor trick.

Wine Tasting Experiments

    One of the most interesting approaches to helping people understand tannins, acidity, sweetness, and alcohol levels in wine is by taking five glasses of the same wine and doctoring four of the glasses to feature one of the above mentioned aspects (acidity, tannins, alcohol, and sweetness). For example, take five glasses of a pinot noir. Leave one alone. Add a drop or two of vodka to one, a squirt of lemon to another, a tea bag to one, and some sugar to the remaining one. The differences across these glasses of wine will be quite pronounced and may help you get better at identifying the subtle nuances of acidity, tannins, alcohol, and sweetness in wine when you encounter them. There are many different activities or experiments you can do to help improve your tasting abilities. A simple online search will reveal a wide array of such activities.

How Different Wine Experts Approach Wine Tasting

    I think it might be informative to take a quick look at the variety of ways some of the most renown wine tasters and critics approach wine tasting. The following are excerpts from several famous wine critics sharing a bit about their personal approach to wine tasting. It is interesting how different, and yet how similar, these approaches are:

Ray Isle

Consequently, the first thing that goes through my mind is, broadly, what is this wine? Where is it from, what do I know about it (if anything). What do I know about the region, the variety, the soil, the climate, the producer, and all that.

Anthony Galloni

Some of the key attributes I look for are an expression of grape, vintage and place, complexity, persistence and, in the world’s top regions, the ability of wines to develop with age. Ultimately, it is my many years of experience tasting all over the world and across a wide range of styles that allows me to place each wine in its context. That context then forms the basis for an in-depth critical evaluation that is expressed in a tasting note, score and drinking window.

Lisa Perrotti-Brown

Tasting wine can be considered a two-part process. The first part is linked to natural ability: your ability to detect aroma and flavor compounds using your nose and tongue.The second part is the ability to compare a wine that is being tasted to a mental library of many, many, many other wines of its peer group.

James Suckling

Technically, I use 15 points for color, 25 for aromas, 25 for body and structure, and 35 for overall impressions. So, I work that through in my mind. Sometimes I'll write it down particularly after tasting a lot of wines, just to bring that into focus.

    You can see how differently each of these experts approaches wine tasting. Each has their own perspective and their own tasting routine. For me, this suggests that each of us as aspiring wine enthusiasts needs to find our own way into wine tasting by developing our own perspectives and set of procedures. And remember, it is still about wine, good friends, and good times, no matter how our tasting processes evolve.    

A Brief Note on Tasting Objectivity

Although, a more extensive discussion on objectivity will be provided in the next chapter, I think it is important to share a couple ideas here before proceeding. Physiochemical elements undoubtedly exist in a glass of wine, for example chemicals, enzymes, acids, and alcohol, and these elements that can be measured with modern-day instruments to a certain degree of accuracy. In addition, the density of the wine in the glass, the volume of wine, the acidity levels, the amount of sugars, and even the color and clarity can be measured using various techniques to a remarkable level of scientific accuracy. 

Wine professionals and scientists have invented instruments that can provide detailed measurements of many things, but not taste. Taste is up to humans. To put it more directly, there is no such thing as a purely objective process for wine tasting. As long as there are humans involved in the process there will be some degree of subjectivity (we are, in fact, subjects). When we share our wine tasting notes or observations, we are not talking about what is objectively in the glass. Instead, we are talking about our human perceptions of what is in the glass, using visual and olfactory senses. We cannot leave our senses behind and just purely experience a wine. Our wine experiences are always filtered through our sensory channels and cognitive apparatus.

The difference between the elements of a wine and the taste of a wine are often referred to as the differences between the objective and subjective qualities or experiences of a wine. The taste of a wine, as experienced by a person is more subjective than the basic elements of a wine that exist in a glass or a bottle. Sharing one’s experiences of tasting a wine also requires the use of language to share one’s sensations, memories, and experiences. What is involved in understanding the taste of a wine is even more complicated than even a cursory discussion can reveal, but I will take a stab at it in the next chapter.

So What?

I suggest the best way to move forward is to taste as many different wines as you can. Buy some moderately-priced wines from regions you have not tried yet. Balance your search for classic wines and classic regions by exploring new regions that have wines that are probably better priced and may offer similar profiles. Don’t limit yourself to one place or one varietal. There are many great wine regions and varietals that are not readily available but may become your next favorite wine.

Take a look at some of the tasting grids I have included in the appendix, including the one I created, and those from other organizations and wine experts. Develop your own tasting grid and your own set of procedures and approaches for analyzing a wine. Try to be consistent in your process and pay close attention to what your senses are telling you about the wine in the glass in front of you. Find some friends to taste with and make it more of an event than an exam. And most of all, enjoy the wines you taste and the people with whom you taste them. That is where the real magic lies.