Taste wine like a pro and see what’s important in wine tasting.
Learning how to taste wine is no different than learning how to appreciate music or any form of art. The results of this learning process give pleasure proportional to the efforts you have put in acquiring the knowledge about wine. The more you sharpen your senses, the better you’ll understand the nuances in high-quality wines. The time and effort you put in training your taste buds is not just useful, but a lot of fun too.
In order to taste wine properly one needs to have amazingly developed sense of smell because this enables you to“decipher” the subtle scents coming from complex wines. Generally, wine aromas are very complex and are the most relevant part of wine tasting. Your nose is a key to your taste buds. Once you’ve learned how to smell wine, you’ll be able to determine different flavors contained in wine and you’ll also notice a particular interaction occurring between the two senses, such that sometimes you may even find it difficult to describe.
Although there is no right or wrong way to learn how to differentiate flavors and tastes in wine, yet some unwritten rules exist. First of all, you must be focused and find your own approach (style) to wine tasting that you’ll be adhering to. If you really want to learn about wines, you need to be committed to it, meaning that whenever you take a glass of wine, form a habit to take a minute to eliminate whatever distractions you may have from the surrounding and concentrate on the wine in glass, and by that I refer to smells, taste and the wine finish, i.e. the taste wine leaves in your mouth a couple of moments after you’ve tasted it.
It’s only natural that drinking cold rosé wine from a plastic glass at some garden party doesn’t require the same effort as drinking that same wine from a specially designed wine glass. Also, you must have heard that any wine that tastes good is in fact a good wine. And that is true, but only in case your goal is to drink and enjoy wine and it differs a great deal from what understanding and appreciation of the wine is really all about.
If you learn to taste wine like an expert, you’ll be able to identify fragrant compounds and main tastes in the wine and you’ll also be able to recognize characteristics of various grape varieties. Moreover, you’ll learn to recognize certain wine faults and be sure that there are bad wines on the market and not all fall in the category of cheap wines. Sometimes spoiled wine may be the result of a bad cork or improper wine storage.
All in all, as a wine beginner we assume you know the main differences between white and red wines, but you should be familiar with wine types and grape varieties as well. For this reason, we recommend you to learn more about the most important white and red wine grapes like Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel etc. You’ll surely find many interesting information which will make you want to gain as much knowledge as possible until you become like a real wine pro. As of that moment, wine tasting will become your favorite hobby.
More at: www.vinoteka-viola.com / www.wineshop.hr
P. Mimica, MS in Agricultural Engineering