Tasting wine

Wine tasting is Tasting with a narrower object. The shared skill is naming only what you perceived. This page is a sequence for a glass, not a score, not a ranking of regions, and not a vocabulary performance.

Look #

Hold the glass against something white. Color depth in a red is not quality; it is often extraction and age. A young purple rim and a brick rim are different times in the same bottle’s life. Clarity matters for faults (haze, unexpected fizz in a still wine). Viscosity (“legs”) mostly tracks alcohol and sugar; it is a weak quality sermon.

Smell #

Short sniffs, not a vacuum. Fruit, floral, herbal, spice, oak, oxidation (sherry-like), reduction (struck match, which may blow off). Temperature hides aroma when the wine is too cold. A dirty glass is not the vineyard.

Taste — map the physics #

Sip enough to coat. Then separate the sensations:

• Sweetness at the tip — residual sugar, not “fruity aroma.” A dry wine can smell like berries and still finish without sugar.
• Acidity as tartness and whether the mouth waters. Low acid tastes flabby; high acid tastes sharp. Same grape, different region and pick date, different acid.
• Tannin as dryness and grip, especially on gums and inner cheeks. It is tactile. Smith, McRae, and Bindon: astringency is the drying, puckering feel from tannin–saliva protein binding; higher acidity makes the same tannin feel more astringent ¹. That is why a high-acid, tannic young red can feel harsher than a rounder one with similar phenolic numbers.
• Alcohol as warmth in the throat and a sense of body. Heat that shouts usually means the wine is warm or the alcohol is high relative to the rest of the structure.
• Body as weight — a combination of alcohol, extract, and sugar, not a synonym for quality.
• Finish as what remains after you swallow or spit. Length is interesting; so is whether bitterness or oak varnish takes over.

Variables #

Glass shape, serving temperature, whether the bottle was open yesterday, what you ate, and what you just smelled. Cheese fat and salt change the next sip; that is why Tasting cheese and this page should know each other, not copy each other.

What not to do #

Do not invent tasting notes for a wine you have not had. Do not treat “let it breathe 30 minutes” as a law; some wines open, some fall apart, some were fine in the first minute. Watch the glass.

Return to Wine for how the liquid was made. Grape is the agricultural object.