How To Taste Wine (part 2)

this article from winemag.com

So, want to learn how to taste and evaluate a glass of wine like an expert? Easy. Follow our wine tasting tips below—but before you start sipping, make sure you’re in the right tasting environment. We now shift our focus to evaluating by sniff.

Evaluating by Sniff

Now that you’ve given the wine a good look, you’re ready to take a good sniff. Give the glass a swirl, but don’t bury your nose inside it. Instead, you want to hover over the top like a helicopter pilot surveying rush hour traffic. Take a series of quick, short sniffs, then step away and let the information filter through to your brain.

There are many guides to help you train your nose to identify key wine fragrances, both good and bad. There are potentially thousands of aroma components in a glass of good wine, so forget about finding them all. Naming all the fruits, flowers, herbs and other scents you can trowel out of the glass can be a fun game, but it’s not essential to enjoying and learning how to taste wine. Once you’ve taken a few quick, short sniffs of the wine, try to look for the following aromas, which will help you better understand the wine’s characteristics.

The Evaluation

Once your tasting conditions are as close to neutral as possible, your next step is to examine the wine in your glass. It should be about one-third full. Loosely follow these steps to evaluate the wine visually.

• Wine Flaws
  First, you want to look for off-aromas that indicate a wine is spoiled. A wine that is corked will smell like a musty old attic and taste like a wet newspaper. This is a terminal, unfixable flaw.
• Fruit Aromas
  If there are no obvious off-aromas, look for fruit aromas. Wine is made from grapes, so it should smell like fresh fruit, unless it is very old, very sweet, or very cold.
• Flowers, Leaves, Herbs, Spices & Vegetables
  Floral aromas are particularly common in cool climate white wines like Riesling and Gewürztraminer, and some Rhône varietals, including Viognier.
• Wine Barrel Aromas
  If you smell toast, smoke, vanilla, chocolate, espresso, roasted nuts, or even caramel in a wine, you are most likely picking up scents from aging in new oak barrels.
• Secondary Aromas
  Young white wines and young sparkling wines may have a scent very reminiscent of beer. This is from the yeast. Some dessert wines smell strongly of honey; this is evidence of botrytis, often called noble rot, and is typical of the very greatest Sauternes. Chardonnays that smell of buttered popcorn or caramel have most likely been put through a secondary, malolactic fermentation, which converts malic to lactic acids, softening the wines and opening up the aromas. Older wines have more complex, less fruity aromas. A fully mature wine can offer an explosion of highly nuanced scents, beautifully co-mingled and virtually impossible to name. It is pure pleasure.

In Part Three of “How to Taste Wine”, we will look at evaluating by taste.

If you would like to read this full article, go to winemag.com here