Tasting Technique

Start with clarity: a healthy wine is clear and bright. Then look at depth of colour, from pale to deep, and at the hue. White wines run from lemon-green through lemon and gold to amber. Reds run from purple through ruby and garnet to tawny. Rosés run from pink through salmon to orange.

Colour is a set of clues. Deep reds come from thick-skinned grapes, warm climates, or sometimes oak. Pale reds come from thin-skinned grapes such as Pinot Noir, though not always: Nebbiolo is pale and still very tannic. As wines age, reds fade from purple towards garnet and brick at the rim, and whites deepen from lemon to gold. Colour shows age and grape, not quality.

Tilt the glass at an angle against a white background and look at the rim, where the edge is thinnest and any change in colour shows. The streaks that run down the glass after you swirl, called legs or tears, reflect alcohol and sugar, and say nothing about quality.

Swirling wets the sides of the glass and releases aromas. Take a short first sniff, then a longer second one. Ask three things in order: is it clean, or does it smell faulty? How intense is it, from light to pronounced? And what does it smell of?

It helps to sort what you smell into three tiers. Primary aromas come from the grape itself: fruit, flowers and herbs. Secondary aromas come from winemaking: bread and biscuit from yeast, butter from malolactic fermentation, vanilla and toast from oak. Tertiary aromas come from ageing: leather, mushroom, nuts, honey and dried fruit. Seeing many tertiary notes tells you the wine is mature.

Do not worry about naming exact fruits. Start with families: citrus, green fruit, stone fruit, tropical, red fruit, black fruit, floral, herbal, spice. That is the way the WSET approaches it, and it is more reliable than guessing at raspberry versus strawberry. Your smell memory improves quickly if you deliberately sniff fruit, herbs and spices in the kitchen, and connect them to what you find in a glass.

Take a decent sip, let it coat your mouth, and work through the same checklist every time: sweetness, acidity, tannin (in reds), alcohol, body, then the intensity and character of the flavours, and finally the finish. Using an order keeps you from noticing only what is loudest.

Each element has its own sensation. Sweetness is a coating, sugary feel. Acidity makes your mouth water, especially at the sides of your tongue and under it. Tannin dries and grips the gums and inner cheeks. Alcohol gives warmth in the throat and back of the mouth. Body is the weight of the wine overall, like the difference between skimmed and whole milk.

Compare with the scales used on the grape pages. Taste a Riesling and a Chardonnay side by side, and the difference in acidity is obvious. Taste a Gamay and a Cabernet Sauvignon, and you feel light and full body. Once each scale has a real reference in your memory, describing a new wine becomes easy.

The last step is to sum the wine up. Professional tasters judge quality on four criteria: balance (do the elements harmonise?), length (how long does the flavour last after swallowing?), intensity (how concentrated are the aromas and flavours?), and complexity (are there many layers that change over time?). A wine with all four is outstanding.

Finish is easy to practise: swallow, and count the seconds that the flavour lasts. Short means it fades within a few seconds. Long means it stays for ten seconds or more, and evolves rather than just lingering.

You also form a view on readiness: is it ready to drink now, could it improve, or is it past its best? Structure helps decide. Wines with plenty of acidity, tannin, sugar and concentration tend to age well, while lighter, simpler wines are usually best young.

Try to keep liking and quality apart. You may enjoy a simple wine more than a great one, and that is fine. Concluding separately lets you learn what quality looks like without changing what you like.

Cork taint is caused mainly by a compound called TCA, and smells of wet cardboard or a damp cellar, with the fruit dulled and muted. It affects a small share of bottles sealed with natural cork. Oxidation, too much exposure to oxygen, makes a wine taste flat, nutty and like bruised apple. Volatile acidity gives a vinegar or nail-polish smell, and Brettanomyces gives barnyard, horse-sweat and medicinal notes.

There is also reduction, where a wine smells of struck match or rotten egg because of sulphur compounds. It often blows off with air, so decanting or a swirl can fix it, unlike cork taint, which cannot be fixed.

Some of these traits are sometimes deliberate. Oloroso Sherry and the yellow wines of the Jura are made oxidatively on purpose. A trace of Brett or volatile acidity is part of some traditional wines. The question is whether the trait dominates and whether it fits the style.

Not everything odd is a fault. Small clear crystals at the bottom of a bottle or on the cork are tartrates, harmless, and a sign that the wine was not chilled to remove them before bottling, and old reds naturally throw sediment. If you suspect a bottle in a restaurant, ask politely for another opinion.

Skill in tasting comes from deliberate repetition, the same way as any other craft. Use the same routine every time, taste with one reference point in mind, and write down what you find. Over weeks and months your notes become a record of your palate, and they let you spot patterns you cannot see in a single glass.

Here is a simple plan. Start by tasting two whites side by side, for example a Sauvignon Blanc and a Chardonnay, and write down how they differ on each element. Then taste the same grape from a cool and a warm region, and note what the climate changes. Move on to reds, and try to identify tannin and body. Try to taste blind when you can: cover the label, decide, then check.

Ampelos has tools for each stage. The blind tasting page lets you practise reading a grape's structure and flavours with no bottle at all, and the quiz tests recall of grapes and regions.