Classic Wines

Tips for Developing Your Wine Tasting Ability

Buying a bottle of wine can be an intimidating and mystifying process for many people. Everyone has had the unfortunate experience of buying a bottle in a shop, filled with hope about what pleasures would await inside it, only to return home and discover it was just ok, or even worse, that they totally hate it. When I'm working in the wine store, I'm hoping to help people avoid this pitfall when they ask me for a recommendation. But the tough thing is that a lot of people find it really difficult to put into words what they like. This makes my job hard, and more often than not, I'll be forced to recommend something I like a lot, rather than something that suits the customer's taste. My goal in this column is to give you some of that vocabulary, so you can learn more about what you like and be able to communicate it to the worker in the store, or the waiter at the restaurant.

Before we can get your started building new vocabulary, however, you need to learn a few things about how to taste wines. If you're trying to evaluate a wine, it's important to get a really good smell of it, and to let it touch every part of your mouth. This, for me, is one of the most enjoyable parts about drinking wine. It's a visceral and sensory experience that makes you slow down and really appreciate what you've got in front of you. You should swirl your glass in circles rapidly, which aerates the wine and sends aromas shooting up the glass into your nose. After you swirl, tilt the glass so the top of the wine is parallel to the ground, and stick your nose in the glass so it's pointing straight down at the wine. Now, with your mouth open, take several short sniffs, like a dog, and just see what you notice. Next, comes the tasting. When you get the wine in your mouth, swirl it all around your mouth, including your gums, teeth, tongue and cheeks. Then open your mouth a little and breath some air over the wine, so you make sort of a slurping noise. Let the aromas waft down your throat and enjoy! Our mouth can only taste 4 things - sweet, salty, bitter, and acidic. All the little flavor nuances we taste actually come from our nose, as the aromas waft down the back of our throat to our olfactory glands, so don't miss out on those aromas! It's also important that you find a method for how you smell and taste, and do it the same way every time. That way you'll start an unconscious database in your mind to compare wines against each other.

Now that you know how to taste, it's time to start quantifying what you taste. What I'd like you to do is to evaluate each wine you taste in three categories. For red wines, I'd like to try to get a sense of how fruity, earthy, and spicey it is. For white wines, it's the same thing, except in white wines we refer to earthiness as minerality. In this article, I'm going to talk about one specific quality of white wines-fruit. In the coming weeks I will hone in on minerality and spice, but for now let's just pay attention to fruit.

I want to make it clear that fruit in the way I'm talking about is totally distinct from sweetness. Fruit has nothing to do with how much sugar is in a wine, only how fruity it tastes, and there is quite a large range of this in white wines. Sometimes very fruity wines can fool people into thinking that they are sweet. In the wine world, when a wine has sugar in it, we refer to it as sweet. Makes sense right? When something is not sweet, however, we refer to it as dry. Doesn't make quite as much sense does it? But anyway, that's what we call it so it's good to remember.

If you want to test yourself on what a dry white tastes like compared to a fruity white, order up a sweet Riesling and compare it to a dry one. Here's one tip for how to tell if a Riesling is sweet just by looking at the bottle. If the alcohol percentage of the wine is lower than 10, it's probably very sweet. If it's between 10-12, it's probably what we call off-dry, or halbtrocken in Germany, which all means that it's about half sweet. And if it's over 12, it's most likely completely dry, or in German, trocken. The reason for this is that during fermentation, yeast converts the sugar in the grape juice into alcohol. When fermentation stops earlier, this means that there is residual sugar left over in the wine, so therefore the alcohol percentage will be lower. The sweet wine, you may notice, will produce a slight tingling sensation on the tip of your tongue. This is the area of your tongue that senses sweetness. Unfortunately many of us, especially in America, have eaten so many sweets, that this area of our tongue has become somewhat numb to the effects of sugar. If you don't notice anything in the wine, try putting a little sugar on the tip of your tongue and see if you can feel it then.

Fruitiness in a white wine gets divided into a few different categories. It's generally agreed on that white wines can taste of either tropical, stone, or citrus fruits. See if you can get a sense for which one your wine is like, and which you like better. Wine experts love to come up with very specific examples of each of these categories, like pineapple, peaches or pears, and lemon. This is all in good fun, and feel free to come up with your own. But at a certain level, these specific tastes are entirely subjective. If a wine expert says something tastes like a Georgia peach, and you think it's much more like a nectarine, you're both right.

So for now, while you're drinking white wines, try to notice what kind of fruit you taste in the wine, and how intense that flavor is compared to other elements you taste. New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs, for example, often have strong citrus tastes of grapefruit and lemon. Do you like that? Do you like it when it's really strong, like in New Zealand? Maybe you like those qualities more in a French Sancerre, were the citrus tastes are present but much more subdued. It's all about figuring out what you like. Be prepared, because over time your tastes may change and in a few months you may find yourself re-evaluating everything. It's all part of the adventure. Stay tuned for next week's column, in which I'll discuss minerality in white wines. Happy tasting!