How do you taste wine? Some people simply drink their wine as if it were a glass of diet coke, while others truly savor and enjoy the taste of it. Tasting wine is an art that requires a great deal of practice and experience to master. The experienced taster can classify one specific wine from another.

Can a wine expert really tell whether a particular wine was made in a certain year? Or what season the wine was produced in? The answer is yes! There are people who can really determine such information just by tasting.

Aromas of Wine

You know how bland food tastes when you have a cold right? That’s because your sense of smell helps you distinguish flavors, wine tasters realize this. True wine tasters always smell their wine before the taste it. Researchers say that about seventy five percent of what we taste is due to the fact that our sense of smell helps our taste buds work. For this reason, we can say that a good aroma determines a good taste. Some of the common aromas of wine already identified are: earthy, floral, fruity, woody, herbs and spices.

Methods of Wine Tasting

Wine is a very relaxing drink, but there’s a lot more pleasure derived from wine when you enjoy it with all of our senses. This is called sensory evaluation or in simple terms — evaluating wine with the use of all your senses. Wine tasting requires three different senses, these are: the look, the smell and the taste. Each of these aspects helps evaluate the wine.

The Look

The first step in tasting wine is simply examining it. Does the wine look appetizing? Is the wine clear or is it cloudy? While the wines clarity does not really matter to the taste, wine tasting is very subjective in nature. The fact is that different individuals will rate the same wine differently simply based on it’s appearance.

The Aroma

Smelling the wine helps us truly determine the quality of a wine. Aging wine in oak barrels adds more flavor and aroma to the wine. Vanilla or Cinnamon flavors in particular could be added during aging. As aging progresses, an earthy scent could be recognized as say roses or wildflowers. The scent of grapefruit is a common aroma as well as citrus, pine, apple and cantaloupe. Other wines elicit an elusive smell of herbs and spice as say freshly ground black pepper.

The Taste

The taste of wine varies from sweet to sour and finally bitter. Since wine is made of fermented fruit, it often does have a sour taste to it, but usually with a touch of sweetness. Wine tasters have individual preferences as well as cultural bias. Americans, for instance, prefer sweet wines. Mexicans however, are fond of sour drinks, as they love the taste of citrus flavor. Germans prefer wine with a little spice, while Italians like wine to be a little bit bitter. Hence, taste depends quite a bit on one’s cultural upbringing

In conclusion, tasting wine is not merely drinking and swallowing. It involves aroma, sight and taste to conjure up an overall feeling about the wine. It sounds complicated but once you’ve tried the techniques, you’ll understand…