What To Do At Your First Wine Tasting

Okay, so we’ve persuaded you to go to your first wine tasting.
Inhibitions shed, you’re standing at a table in front of a row of bottles, glass in hand. Probably the host will have provided tasting notes, in which case you can safely work through bottles – however many there are – in the suggested order. Otherwise start with the whites. Work cheapest to dearest along the row then go on to the reds.

If the host doesn’t pour, then be bold and reach for the bottle. Don’t fill the glass, in fact don’t even half fill it, an inch and a half of wine in the bottom will do fine.

For complicated chemical reasons that I won’t even go into, you need to get some air into the wine, the better to appreciate it. Place the glass on the table and, holding it by the stem, swirl it round a few times, with a stirring motion. The object is to coat the sides of the glass not splash your fellow tasters – don’t overdo it! Experienced tasters can swirl the glass around effectively in mid air, but for beginners and clumsy buggers like me, best to rest on the table while you twirl.

Hold the glass up to the light and inspect the colour of the wine. Concentrate hard and commit to memory. Then put your nose into the glass and take a decent sniff. Decide whether it smells nice, nasty or neutral. Again, concentrate and lock any impressions of what the wine actually smells like away in your memory bank. Smell will be the key impression at this stage but don’t expect the wine to smell ‘grapey’, very few do. But you might get fruity sensations – “hmmm…peaches?” Or flowers, herbs or spices – “violets?” “vanilla?” “pepper?” – that you’ll may be able to recall later.

Taste. Slurp a generous mouthful and, as you do so, breathe in some air at the side of your mouth. Leave the wine in your mouth for a good few seconds, then find the spittoon and get rid.

Holding the liquid in your mouth, you’ll discover that wine actually has ‘weight’ (some feel heavier than others). Concentrate again – this time on the wine’s flavours and once more, if you get any impression you can describe, commit it to memory even if it’s as silly as “like chewing the tyres off a ten-year-old tractor.” Actually this isn’t as daft as it sounds, especially if you’re guzzling Pinotage or immature Barolo.

Pause. Think. Is the wine still ‘with you’? Or has it ‘died’ i.e. do you find it hard to remember what it was like?

At this stage write down simply whether you enjoyed the wine. As I’ve said before, there’s no more valid thing you can say about a wine than “that’s lovely”, “this is bloody marvellous” or “uggh, dreadful”. Experienced tasters make this judgement all the time. And a lot more besides, of course, so it would also do no harm to jot down any colour, smell or taste sensations that came into your head. No need to show them to anyone. Then it’s on to the next bottle.

So does it smell and taste nice? Does it leave any lasting impression? How much and would I buy it? For many people this is enough. But if you want to get your anorak badge or hold a meaningful conversation with your winey friends you’ll need to get the hang of Winespeak, first official language of the genus Wine Geek.

There’s no grammar to worry about, just a load of adjectives, falling into five categories:
a) Scientific. Examples are ‘oxidised’ ‘sulphited’, describing an actual chemical condition; we’ll talk about these another time.
b) Pseudo-scientific. Words adopted by wine critics as a convenient label for a particular chemical condition. ‘corked’ ‘confected’.
c) Judgmental. ‘joyous’, ‘elegant’, ‘vibrant’. Wine Geeks who have been on courses tend to sneer at this sort of language, saying it’s imprecise and opinionated – which I reckon is a clear case of pot calling kettle “dusky-hued.”
d) Slightly unhinged: “aroma of girlfriend’s damp Nike trainers”; “sweaty saddles” “Rain forest vegetation”. You can bet your life that people who use this sort of language don’t ride, have never been within 5,000 miles of a rain forest and don’t have a girlfriend. I mean, would YOU go out with someone who talked like that? These guys are Freaks, not Geeks.
e) Analytical. Winespeak’s heartbeat, the words used to identify the aromas and flavours most frequently found in wine. A three-tier hierarchy – e.g. in the basement, that overworked word ‘fruity’. Move up to the ground floor and you find ‘tropical’, ‘citrus’, etc. Occupying the penthouse suite are ‘cherries’ ‘bananas’ ‘mangoes’ ‘blackberries’ and other specific fruit. Concentrate your efforts here. Move up from the cellar to the roof garden as quick as you can and your Wine Geek status is assured.

Go to http://www.Retzer-Land.co.at/Weingut-Himmelbauer/tipsand maybe print out The Aroma Wheel. This handy gizmo, brainchild of Prof. Ann Noble, an enologist (wine scientist) at Davis University in California, identifies the aromas and flavours found in wine, gathers the most frequently used tasting terms and groups them according to their similarities. The generalisations are at the hub of the wheel, the specific descriptions on the rim – fruity>berry>blackcurrant. Pretty simplistic really, but it’s a good start to understanding Winespeak. If you fancy having the aroma wheel in more durable form you can order a laminated plastic version via the UC Davis Website www.wineserver.ucdavis.edu/acnoble, or you could buy the t-shirt (no kidding). Bit embarrassing though, getting your kit off at a tasting in order to consult the wheel and write your notes.