It seems that so much is said about tasting wine, with its bouquets and tannins, legs and leather, that it can be hard to work out what people are on about — and just how serious they are. For those who’d like to understand more, the subject can seem at once so opaque, so vast and so arcane that even trying to work out where to start can be intimidating. But wine is one of those things in relation to which a little incremental knowledge tends to have exponentially large effects on how one enjoys a good glass or two of pinot noir. That’s just a part of wine’s magic.
There are a few clear things that professionals are looking for when they’re tasting a wine. These are its appearance, it’s odour in the glass, the sensations it creates in the mouth, and its finish. And this may seem a lot for something that’s going into your mouth, but so much of what we taste hits ours senses before it even makes it to our palate. Half of what we experience as ‘flavour’ actually comes from our sense of smell.
The visual characteristics generally come first and it’s a good idea to try to get a look at the wine in the glass from a number of angles. It should first and foremost have clarity as cloudy wines are generally not acceptable, especially with modern production methods. Some modern wine makers have stopped filtering their wines in order to retain their character though and these may, as with many older wines, need to be decanted.
A wine’s colour hue gives clues as to its age, grape maturity, fermentation process, and how long it spent in the barrel. Immature white grapes yield almost colourless wines, whereas fully to over-mature grapes generate yellower wines. On top of that, the longer a white wine spends in an oak barrel, the deeper, more golden the colour gets. Similarly with reds, the younger the grape the brighter, and lighter, the wine will be, whereas a darker colour will indicate a more complex wine that has spent longer in an oak barrel.
Colour becomes especially helpful once more is known about the wine’s grape, age and origin.
Other elements of appearance are not wildly rated by professionals, though are often appreciated by consumers. The appearance of ‘legs’, the rivulets that run down the inside of the glass once the wine is swirled, often cause as much excitement as Marilyn Monroe’s own pair, but are not generally considered to really indicate much more than a rough indication of the wine’s alcohol content.
Much more important are the odours that are released after swirling the glass. This can be the part that raises a million questions. “Did that man just say that my wine smells like green beans? Do I really want anything other than green beans to taste like green beans, especially my wine? Who even knows what tulips smell like anymore? If I like the smell of cigar box, does that mean I have a crush on my friend’s dad that I never knew about?” So many questions.
Because wine is wine, you are excused for thinking a smell is just a smell, and naturally it is not enough that a glass of wine would have a single smell or aroma. In fact, each wine may have several aromas, and all at the same time. These are considered at three different levels, primary, secondary and tertiary, and each one represents different elements of the wine and the way it was produced.
The primary scents of fruits, herbs, earthiness or flowers and spices that first hit you when you open the bottle or take a sniff of the wine — after swirling of course — generally come from the type of grape. Thus a Chardonnay will often kick in with fruity aromas of melon, apple or pineapple, mixed with grass or even butter.
The next layer will take you deeper into the process, so we get the earthy, oak and vanilla flavours from the time a good Chardonnay has spent in an oak barrel. Another example of this is the biscuity flavour that often underpins a good Champagne.
The third level aromas, often referred to as bouquets, come into play when the wine has been well aged and often include traits like coffee, caramel, toffee and cocoa or reductive notes that lean more towards earthy nuances like the damp scents of a wet forest floor, mushrooms or veggie-like components.
The first taste sensations potentially recognised are sweetness and sourness, with sweetness generally hitting the tip of the tongue, while sourness slopes off to the sides of the tongue and inside your cheeks. It tends to hang around there longer than sweetness does.
Bitterness is detected later, with its increasing perception maybe coinciding with a decline in the detection of sweetness. It can take more than 15 seconds for bitterness to reach its peak, usually in the central, posterior portion of the tongue. Therefore, it is advisable to retain the wine in the mouth for at least 15 seconds.
Then, the taster should concentrate on mouth-feel sensations, such as the dry, dust-in-the-mouth aspect of astringency produced by tannins, and the perceptions of burning, which comes from the alcohol, or the prickling, spritzy, aspect of carbon dioxide. These and other sensations spread throughout the mouth, without a specific target area.
Contrary to what your mother and wider society may have advised, apparently the best time to taste wine is apparently at 10:30am, when our palates are wide awake. Maybe after enjoying a delicious Khéma free-flow breakfast…
