Wine tasting: 3 key steps to know!
Learning to taste wine doesn't happen overnight. Generally wine tasting includes 3 stages: the visual stage, the olfactory stage and the taste stage. Without going so far as to detect smoky aromas or other subtleties in the wine, we provide you with useful advice for carrying out a complete sensory analysis.
The stages of wine tasting: #1 visual analysis
To begin your tasting, you can first position your glass above a white surface or under a light source. This allows you to first appreciate the visual appearance of the color of your wine and to obtain a lot of information on its characteristics.
It can be easy to guess the age of a wine just by analyzing its color. Regarding red wines, there are multiple shades of color: purple, cherry, ruby, garnet and tile. For example, a young red wine has a color that tends more towards violet or crimson. Whereas a wine that is already a few years old will tend to be tile colored. As you can see, the older the red wine, the darker its color.
For white wines, the nuances also evolve from the lightest to the darkest tones: green, lemon, gold, straw and red. Young white wines tend to have a rather light green color while an older white is more of a straw yellow, or even amber.
The color of a wine can be influenced by its sweetness, its grape variety, the vintage, the type of fermentation or even the aging. Observe the clarity of the wine, also called the “cleanliness” of the wine. A wine can be clear, hazy or even cloudy. For example, a clear wine does not have particles on the surface.
To detect the viscosity of a wine, remember to analyze its fluidity (observation of the tears in the wine). To do this, simply turn your glass slightly to move the liquid on the walls and analyze the tears. If these are fine and go down quickly, you are looking at a rather acidic wine. And on the contrary, if the tears are thicker then the wine is fatty.
The stages of wine tasting: #2 olfactory examination
This step, which is divided into two stages, is essential for identifying the different aromas of the wine.
The first step, which is called “the first nose”, consists of smelling the wine without swirling the wine. If your wine doesn't smell very good, it's probably corked. If you don't smell anything then you need to aerate the wine to bring out all its aromas. This is what we call “the second nose”.
This second step involves smelling the wine after stirring it circularly in the glass. This allows all the aromas to come to the surface thanks to contact with the air. This approach allows you to identify the aroma family to which your wine belongs by detecting the scents that emerge. If you can't recognize the aromas, proceed by elimination: do these smells remind you of red fruits? Flowers ? Spices ?
There are several families of aromas and among the main ones, we can find: fruity, floral, vegetal, woody, spicy, animal, balsamic, empyreumatic (tobacco, roasting, etc.) or even mineral nuances. After analyzing the olfactory attributes of your wine, the long-awaited moment comes for the tasting stage!
The stages of wine tasting: #3 taste stage
You can finally get down to business! For this step, you need to take a small amount of wine in your mouth. Generally, 2 or 3 large sips are enough (about ¼ of your stemware).
As soon as you have the wine in your mouth, suck in the air by parting your lips then exhale through your nose to circulate the aromas between your mouth and nose. This stage, also called “retro-olfaction”, occurs in three stages:
- Attack: this moment when you take the liquid in the mouth can be different depending on the wine. The attack can be intense, frank or weak. So you can know if your wine is rather bitter, salty, sweet or even acidic. Know that salty reinforces bitterness, sweet dominates salty, reduces acidity and delays bitterness.
- Mid-palate: This is where you can begin to analyze the texture and flavors of your wine. To do this, you must swirl the wine in your mouth, in the same way as if you were chewing food.
- The finish: this step allows you to analyze the length in the mouth, in other words the duration during which you continue to smell the aromas. You can then choose to swallow or spit out your wine .
To remember :
For this final step, you must use each of your senses! The step in wine tasting is not to know if the wine is good but rather to know if you like it. By tasting, you will quickly see which types of wine you like, your palate and your nose will get used to the different aromas. Afterwards, it will be easier for you to choose a wine that suits you.
