The following article discusses the surprising technicalities of wine tasting.

Drinking wine is easy; tasting wine requires following a fairly standard set of procedures. Professional tasters prefer a day-lit, odor-free room with white walls and tabletops to allow for optimum viewing of a wine’s color without anything visually stimulating enough to distract one from the wine. Normal people enjoy tasting wine with friends at a dinner table and do not worry about the distractions of food smells and other niceties.

No matter where you conduct your tasting, make sure your wines are served at the right temperature. This is critical! Wines serves too cold cannot really be tasted. Those served too warm will seem out of balance. By this we mean a warm white wine may seem too sweet, while a warm red wine is apt to taste too acidic or alcoholic.

Because different people come to a tasting with different tasting experiences, they will describe the same wine differently, even if it is registering the same in each person’s brain. If one person usually drinks Cabernet Sauvignon and another usually drinks a softer wine like Merlot, then they are apt to differ in opinion on whether a particular wine is tannic. So it’s an inexact science, but an enjoyable one.

Remember that tasting is not a test – your subjective response is more important that any “right answers”. The bottom line is: Wine that tastes good to you is good wine.

Below is the basic six-step process of wine tasting.

1. Look at the Wine: Judging a wine’s color allows you to make some assessment about how old a wine is and how heavy a wine might feel in you mouth. Young wines are close to purple in color. Over time, they pass through red toward brown. White wines start off in various shades of clear and they head toward a straw color.

Different wines have different colors. Cabernet Sauvignon is darker by nature than Sangiovese. Also, the riper the harvested grape, the more color it adds to a wine.

Judging density of color is where the strong light source and white background come in to play. Clear, clean glasses are also essential. Thickness of color usually indicates a richness, fruitiness, and/or heaviness. Thickness is best judged toward the edges of the wine as it sits on the glass. Glasses are tipped to a 45 degrees angle to create a large edge of wine against the side of the glass. This means you do not want your glass much more than a quarter full during a critical tasting. The proper way to hold any wine glass is by the stem. This will keep smudges off the bowl so you can see your wine better and not influence its temperature with the warmth of you hand.

2. Swirl the wine in the glass: Swirling will help expose a wine to more oxygen, which could be a goal of the taster eager to taste a wine right out of the bottle, but is usually done to release aromas. Swirling is another reason to conservatively fill your wine glass. The tears of wine that slowly run down the side of the bowl after the swirling stops will evaporate quickly and release concentrated aromas. The easiest way to swirl a glass full of wine is to leave the base of the glass on the table. If you swirl your glass somewhat vigorously, you will create an invisible tornado of aromas that lift up and out of your wine glass.

3. Smell the wine: This is where all hell can break loose. Cries of “tar”, elderberries,” “coconut,” “coffee,” “tobacco,” and so on, are apt to be uttered at a tasting. This may be the most difficult aspect of a tasting for the novice to swallow. The best way to smell a wine is to stick your nose into the glass. There is no getting around this. If you are not in a social setting that will support this type of behavior, at least bring the glass very close to your nose. Sticking your nose into the glass right after you swirl it will allow you to catch the updraft of the little tornado of aroma you have created.

It will take you a while before you believe your nose. When you walk near a coffee shop and you smell something that reminds you of what coffee smells like, you conclude you smell coffee. When you stick you nose into a wine glass, you may have a difficult time convincing yourself that you are indeed smelling a wine aroma. Our olfactory sense is our strongest sense and it has the best memory, but most of us do not use it very much in our daily lives.

4. Taste It: Finally, the moment even a neophyte can understand. You may not taste everything the wine veteran claims to taste, but if you listen to what more experienced wine drinkers say about a wine, your mind and your mouth will begin to sense what they are talking about. With time, you will be able to experience and understand the many flavors of wine as well as its important components such as acidity and tannin.

It is important to let the wine linger in your mouth for at least ten seconds; otherwise, you are not really tasting it. It’s important to roll the wine around your mouth with your tongue, exposing it to as much of your mouth as possible. Serious tasters will open their lips a bit and inhale into their mouths while wine rests in the tongue. This encourages vaporization, which releases aroma and flavor.

5. Swallow or Spit: If you are at a dinner table, you are probably not going to be spitting out your experiments. However, if you go to a tasting where you sample a lot of wine, you are going to want to spit out most of the wines you try. Of course it is easier to judge a wine’s aftertaste, known as its “finish,” when you swallow it rather than spitting it into a bucket.

6. Make a Note: If you are at a serious tasting, most people will be making written notes on the wines they are tasting, If you are at a dinner table or friend’s living room, you might not want to pull out a notebook, but should make a permanent mental note of a wine you really like. Then, back at home, write your notes in your book.