Wine Instruction

Wine tasting is more than just an activity, it is an experience as well as an artform. It is a multi-sensory experience involving the eyes, tastebuds and nose. How do you use all of these senses to enhance your wine tasting experience and begin to understand more of the subtleties of the wine? This article gives you a good jumping off point of what you should train your different senses to detect.

In this bit of how-to, wine tasting information regarding the senses most involved will hopefully be fully understood. You see, it isn't merely the senses of taste and smell, but it's also the sense of sight which comes into play, and in fact is the first among these three to be used in analyzing wines. Let's go over all three, starting with sight. There are two major ways to judge wines for body and clarity by sight, and these are as follows...

For clarity, we use our sense of sight. How to do this in wine tasting is we view red wines through the side of the glass, perhaps tipping the glass slightly for better detection - we're focusing on the edge of the surface of the wine here. If at the edge it is fairly dark, we can tell that it is a somewhat young wine, while if the clarity of the color appears lighter than the rest, we can then know that it is an older wine.

With white wines, we instead look down into the wine from above the glass, perhaps swirling it about a bit, viewing the sparkles to judge its clarity. In either case, red wine or white wine, gently tipping the glass or swirling the wine about within it, look to see if the wine adheres a bit to the glass as it falls to rest. Some wines won't adhere at all, but the more it does, the greater the body.

Next up in this "how to", wine tasting using the sense of smell... the nose knows, as they say, and we want to take in the full scent. Swirl your wine about in its glass just a mite, in order to release the aroma and then inhale it slowly and deeply into your nostrils. Besides the fruitiness or berry-like scents, you may also detect spice-like scents, as well as something resembling chocolate - this would be a young wine. Older wines smell more like prunes or raisins.

The final point on this list of how-to wine tasting tips is the sense of taste. Smell and taste are related, so now that you've gotten yourself a snootfull, bathe your tongue with the wine, swirl it about in your mouth, maybe even gargling a little... this will wet the back of your throat and sinuses so that your related senses of smell and taste can work in unison. If your mouth experiences a dryness of flavor, this is due to the tannin content of the wine. You'll notice this more with the deeper, darker red wines, most of all.

If you'd like to learn more about wine tasting or putting together a successful wine tasting party, grab some free wine recipes, learn some wine making tips or want to build a wine cellar, please feel free to drop on by my website on wine information for an informative read on these and other wine making related topics.