People tend to get quite worked-up over tasting wine. It is not necessary to make a great song and dance about it but following some simple techniques can greatly enhance your enjoyment and appreciation of a wine.

 

 

Try to hold the glass against a white or light background. This will give you the best view of its colour and clarity. Note that a faint cloudiness is not necessarily a bad thing as many fine wines are bottled unfiltered. Indeed too many wines suffer from over-zealous filtration that strips away the body and richness of a wine. Tilting the glass and then straightening it should reveal whether it has 'legs'. These are drips that fall slowly back into the wine and is a sign of quality in red wines. The wine's colour can also tell you a lot. In reds the more purple the colour the younger the wine tends to be. As it ages it will go red then orange and finally almost brown. Whites tend to go more golden with age particularly chardonnay. Finally the size and persistence of bubbles in a sparkling wine can reveal a lot. A good quality champagne will have a thin line of persistent small bubbles running up the centre of the glass. A cheap poorly made fizz with have a mass of large bubbles everywhere rather like a fizzy drink. 

 

 

This can be hard especially at the beginning of your wine appreciation. Simply swirl the wine in the glass and take a couple of short sniffs followed by a longer one. Try to think of what you can smell and then read the back of the bottle. After a while you will be able to tell certain aromas. The ones that usually come first are oak or vanilla (often in chardonnay and reds), gooseberry (sauvignon), petrol (riesling), blackcurrant (cabernet sauvignon) and vegetal, earthy (pinot noir). From here your range of smell will broaden. Not only does this improve your appreciation of wine but food also.

 

 

Take a generous mouthful of the wine. Chew it around your mouth for a few seconds and then purse your lips and suck some air into your mouth. Try to note the wine's components: acidity, fruit flavours, oak, tannin (in reds) and texture. (Tannin in usually noted by the feeling of having a coating on your teeth).

 

 

Finally take note of the flavours that are left in your mouth after swallowing. Are you gums watering (a sign of acidity), can you still taste the fruit, how long do the flavours last (length)? These is no need to spit the wine out unless you are tasting several wines at the same time.