A Wine Course in Four Pages

Written by Carolyn Evans-Hammond | 14 October 2010

The business of wine tasting is a curious thing. It’s very different from wine drinking. When I taste a wine wearing my critic’s cap, I pull apart the pleasure experience. I hold each aspect of the wine up against the cold yardstick of imaginary perfection. How’s the colour, fruit, alcohol, and acidity? What about the tannins, balance, complexity, and length? Is it typical? Mature? There’s no quiet conversation, eye-batting flirtation, suggestive comments, or even jazz. Instead, I’m alone at home or with other wine critics in a lab or professional tasting, spittoon in hand. Yes, I spit; inebriation wreaks havoc on tasting notes.

The whole process is rather clinical.

One could argue tasting this way is too removed from the real drinking experience, which may be true. But there’s serious value in technical tasting. It determines exactly why a wine does or doesn’t taste good and therefore why you probably will or won’t like it. Said another way, you might not know why you love or hate a wine but a wine critic probably would. The technical tasting process yields that insight on a bottle-by-bottle basis. Personally, I get a weird pleasure from the whole exercise — and if the banter that ricochets through trade tastings is any indication, other critics share this quirk.

If you affectionately call yourself a “mineral slut” because you like stony whites, or discuss tannins at the dinner table to the dismay of others, keep reading. I’m going to tell you everything you ever wanted to know about technical tasting but were afraid to ask.

In sommelier school, one of the first things you learn is how to taste wine. At the Wine and Spirit Education Trust, where I studied in London, the method is called “the systematic approach to tasting.” Please, don’t trot this process out at your next dinner party. It will peg you as a cork dork faster than your guests can say “screw cap.” Here we go.

appearance
Pour a couple of ounces of wine in a glass — an ISO tasting glass is the industry standard, but any stemware will do so long as the rim is smaller than the bowl to capture the aromas. Now, look at the wine in bright light against a white surface.

clarity
A good quality wine should be clear and bright. If it’s dull or cloudy, it’s either flawed or unfiltered. Unfiltered isn’t necessarily a bad thing; some winemakers don’t filter to maintain extra flavour. But unfiltered wines are more prone to contamination. So just take note of the clarity.

intensity
Now look at the colour intensity. The depth suggests the wine’s grape variety — Pinot Gris is deep compared to Sauvignon Blanc. Malbec is opaque while Pinot Noir is pale. Also, oak and bottle age can both impart deeper colour to white wine while red wines tend to get paler as they mature.

colour
Next, look at the colour. White wines range from water white to golden; rosés go from pale pink to orange; and reds move from purple to tawny-coloured. Brownishness can indicate oxidation, so be on the lookout for that.

rim to core
Taking colour one step further, look at the difference between the wine in the middle of the glass, called the core, and that of the rim. The rim will always be paler but the shade is important because there is no better way to determine a red wine’s maturity than by the shade of its rim — at maturity, most red wines are ruby to brick coloured.

other visual clues
Other visual clues to look for when tasting a wine are legs, tartrate crystals and sediment. Legs or “tears” are the lines that form as wine glides down the inside of the glass after a swirl. The more pronounced the legs, the higher the alcohol and/or sugar levels in the wine — cuing you to be on the look out for those elements on the palate. Tartrate crystals may be present, which are not harmful and don’t imply a fault — the wine simply wasn’t cold stabilized in the winery. Sediment means bottle age, so watch for other indicators of maturity.