HOW TO TASTE WINE
Tasting wine is deeply personal. My methodology, listed below, was informed by years of wine schooling, volunteering at wineries, educating consumers and peers, and traveling broadly. My world view, upbringing, and individual taste all affect how I perceive wine. Tasting notes can alienate as much as they can inform, but hopefully by using this guide as a starting point you’ll be able to build an approach that works for you. In an attempt to make this document as democratic as possible, we’d love to hear your feedback, especially in cases where flavours or textures from particular cultures were omitted.
Why You Should Taste Consciously
Something I wish I learned earlier in my wine career is that you don’t usually pay for deliciousness. The price of a bottle of wine is primarily related to the cost of production. Farming and winemaking are the major factors, but commercial wines also invest heavily in marketing: ostentatious glass bottles, premium label paper, advertising campaigns, showy tasting rooms, etc. Rarity and uniqueness also contribute to price, but their largest influence is on the secondary market (auctions).
If you are going to get the most out of a bottle of wine, you need to learn to taste for more than deliciousness. Terroir, a quality the best wines almost universally display, is a sense of place - somewhereness. It’s the subtle variations that allow you to detect soil, altitude, climate, vintage, aspect, and so much more. It makes certain wines truly unique, impossible to imitate or to simulate. Terroir in itself is not delicious, but it can be the most compelling component of a wine.
Describing wine to others is a messy task. Our olfactory systems are all a little different and our smell and taste memories are incredibly personal. If you’ve never tasted a strawberry before it becomes a fairly useless tasting note. First time tasters usually write what we’d call a ‘grocery list’. Basically, an inventory of items you’d find at your local supermarket. This reductive approach misses the magic of wine. Learning how to taste will help you better explain the true nature of a wine - its quirks, its character, its shape, its texture.
What You’ll Need
Your tasting space should be relatively odorless. Avoid candles, perfumes, aromatic food items, and anything else that might influence how a wine smells. To best see the true colour of a wine, I’d suggest natural light and plenty of it.
You’ll need a vessel. I prefer stemmed wine glasses so you don’t have to hold the wine by the bowl. Your hand will warm the wine prematurely and oils from your fingers can affect your assessment. The rim should be thin, and the bowl should be large enough to allow you to swirl. Swirling helps volatilize all the wines aromatic components simultaneously giving you a fuller picture.
I like to decant my wines, but you certainly don’t have to. Please don’t use one of those aeration gismos; they’re the Slap-Chop of the wine world. We’re wine minimalists. A juice jug or flower vase will do just fine.
Step 1: Appearance
A wine’s appearance can give hints as to how it was made, and what it was made from. Contrary to popular belief, it can’t tell you anything much quality. A dark purple wine is not necessarily better nor more flavourful than pale ruby wine. A white wine edging its way towards the brown end of the colour spectrum is not necessarily past its prime. At this point you’re starting to gather clues about the mysterious liquid in your glass.
Colour: grapes range drastically in colour from deep purple (Syrah, Malbec), to nearly green (Sauvignon Blanc, Grüner Veltliner). Take a quick look at the colour and perhaps it’ll give you a hint about which variety you have in the glass. The vibrancy of a colour can also suggest how old or oxidized a wine is. Red wines turn pale, bricky, and orange with age while whites darken from gold to amber as time goes by.
Clarity: most conventional wines are clarified leaving them as transparent, sterile, and bright as commercial apple juice while most unfiltered wines will have moderate haze or even sediment. There are exceptions, so once again, don’t pass judgement on appearance alone.
Intensity: the depth of a colour can indicate either grape variety, or how long that wine spent in contact with its colour rich grape skins. Cabernet Sauvignon, a dark-skinned grape, will be paler than Pinot Noir, a light-skinned grape, if the former spent one day macerating on its skins while the latter spend two weeks macerating on its skins.
Viscosity: the classic urban legend of wines with ‘legs’ or ‘tears’ tasting better needs to come to an end. The only thing these small beads of liquid clinging to the side of your glass can tell you are the alcohol and sugar content. High alcohol wines with more sugar will cling to the glass more thanks to their greater viscosity and surface tension.
Step 2: Aroma
This is by far the most important part of your wine journey - it can also be the most baffling to newcomers. We each have our own unique aroma palette from which to choose descriptors. Some of these are nearly universal (apple, cherry), some are more wine specific (wet wool, crushed stone), and others are deeply personal (your grandmother’s house). The first two categories are the most useful when trying to accurately describe aromas to someone, but the latter category can be very useful for your personal notes.
Perhaps the best part about smelling wine is that you can’t be wrong. If you think you smell something, you are indeed smelling it and nobody can tell you otherwise. If you smell chocolate in a Sauvignon Blanc (something I can’t even fathom) that is irrefutably what it smells like to you.
Most aromas are traceable to specific compounds created in the grape during the growing season, via fermentation during winemaking, or ageing. This means when you smell raspberry in a wine, it is most likely C10H12O2, the compound that literally makes raspberries smell as they do. The same can be said of butter; Diacetyl, the aroma compound in I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, can naturally be created in wines that go through malolactic-conversion.
When you start looking for aromas in a wine it’s best to start with a game plan. Instead of just smelling and hoping the information will come to you, have a strategy - a search grid so you don’t miss anything. At first, I strongly recommend using a list of flavours and pulling from it instead you trying to divine your own from thin air. Then you can simply go through the list asking yourself “does this smell like X? Yes? No?”. Once you have that list internalized, aromas will come to you much faster. After years your internal list will include thousands of scents to gloss through.
1. Always Start with Fruit Descriptors: All but the most esoteric wines will smell primarily of fruit making these aromas an ideal jumping off point. Fruit characteristics can tell you a lot about grape variety, climate, terroir, and even vintage.
White Wine
Citrus: Lime: Lemon, Meyer Lemon, Grapefruit, Pomelo
Green Fruit: Green Apple, Green Pears, Kiwi, Gooseberry, White Currant, Green Fig, Starfruit, Green Papaya, Green Grape, Honeydew
Orchard Fruit: Yellow Apple, Red Pear, Nectarine, Yellow Plum, Apricot, Peach
Tropical Fruit: Mango, Red Papaya, Lychee, Pineapple, Rambutan, Cantaloupe, Passionfruit, Orange, Tangerine, Clementine
Red Wine
Red Fruit: Red Apple, Red Currant, Cranberry, Strawberry, Pomegranate, Raspberry, Prickly Pear, Red Plum, Red Cherry, Watermelon, Blood Orange, Cascara
Black Fruit: Black Plum, Black Currant, Blackberry, Elderberry, Saskatoon Berry, Black Cherry
Confected Fruit: Date, Black Fig, Prune, Raisin
2. Qualify the Fruit: Fruit flavours on their own are only so specific. To truly get a handle on the wine I always find it best to look back through my list of fruits and add qualifiers where necessary. An underripe strawberry couldn’t evoke something more different than strawberry jam yet both are undeniably strawberry.
Early Season: Early, Young, Sour, Tart, Green, Underripe
Late Season: Shrivelled, Ripe, Overripe, Juicy, Jammy, Desiccated, Rotting, Unctuous
Other: Grilled, Charred, Pickled, Dried, Preserved, Candied, Canned, Cooked, Stewed, Smashed, Shredded, Acrid
3. Fresh Non-Fruit Aromas: After you’ve identified a couple fruit characteristics it’s time to move into all the fresh non-fruit characteristics. These are aromas that probably come from the grape itself and not from the ageing process.
Flowers: Rose, Cherry Blossom, Apple Blossom, Pear Blossom, Orange Blossom, Peony, Violet, Chamomile, Hibiscus, Lavender, Jasmine, Lilac, Honeysuckle
Herbal: Grass, Fennel, Asparagus, Green/Yellow/Red Pepper, Jalapeño, Moss, Mint, Thyme, Sage, Parsley, Tarragon, Oregano, Bay, Pine Needles, Carrot Tops, Aloe, Eucalyptus, Lime Leaf, Lemon Grass, Liquorice, Tomato, Sweet Corn, Hops, Wasabi Root, Shiso, Cabbage, Cannabis, Cucumber, Radish
4. The Details: From here we move on to noticing developmental aromas. These aromas generally come from fermentation, biological processes, and ageing. These characteristics can help you identify how old the wine is, how it was made, and sometimes hints about soil and grape variety. You won’t necessarily find aromas from each category in every wine, but they’re worth looking for nonetheless. Keep in mind these aromas are neither positive nor negative, they’re simply part of the story.
New Oak: Vanilla, Wood, Coconut, Maple, Bacon, Sweet Smoke
Fungal: Morel, Chanterelle, Oyster Mushroom, Shitake, Porcini, White/Black Truffle, Damp Earth
Dank: Barnyard, Sweat, Blood, Manure, Leather, Dried Meat, Game, Fur
Mineral: Sulphur, Flint, River Stones, Granite, Salt, Terracotta, Gunpowder, Graphite, Limestone, Dust, Petrichor, Geosmin, Sand, Basalt
Confected: Caramel, Butterscotch, Pine Nut, Walnut, Macadamia Nut, Brazil Nut, Pistachio, Cashew, Coffee, Chocolate, Nougat, Praline, Sesame
Spices: Nutmeg, Ginger, Allspice, Star Anise, Caraway, Black/White/Pink/Szechuan Peppercorns, Cinnamon, Galangal, Angelica, Juniper, Cinchona, Beechwood, Redwood, Rooibos, Ylang Ylang, Fynbos, Ginseng
Lactic: Butter, Milk, Yoghurt, Whipped Cream, Croissant, Brioche
Other: Green/Black/White/Oolong Tea, Tobacco, Honey, Bees Wax, Hay, Wool, Fresh Linen, Rice, Rye, Oats, Buckwheat, Flax, Beans, Tofu, Rubber, Smoke, Volatile Acidity, Ethyl Acetate
Step 3: The Palate
When tasting wine, your mouth is primarily noticing structural components. Your tongue is only capable of detecting Salt, Sweet, Bitter, Sour, Umami, Spice, and Texture. When you ‘taste’ a raspberry, you tongue is really only confirming that its structural components align with the aromas - ‘this thing in my mouth is consistent with the acidity, sweetness, etcetera I’d expect from a Raspberry’.
The second component of taste is retronasal olfaction or smelling the wine from inside your own mouth. This happens as compounds in the wine volatilize and make their way into your nose through the back of the throat. Unlike wine in the glass, wine in your mouth is warmed by your body temperature, the pH is changed by your saliva, and digestion begins revealing notes in the wine previously undetectable. This is why it’s so incredibly important to focus after you swallow or spit.
1. Acidity: Tartaric, Malic, and Lactic acids are most prevalent in wine. They range from astringent or fruity, to soft or milky. Assessing acid is incredibly challenging for many new wine drinkers. In the presence of sweetness or alcohol, acidity can seem subdued even if the wine physically has a lot of acid. Many novice tasters also experience ‘Acid-Bitter Confusion’ where they mistake acidity for bitterness.
It takes a long time to calibrate your palate and learn where to hunt for acidity. After swallowing or spitting the wine, I like to close my mouth, tilt my head forward, and think about how quickly I’m salivating. For me it’s a reliable objective way of detecting acid: more salivation equals higher acid.
Quantify: Low, Moderate, High
Quality: Sour, Tart, Fruity, Puckering, Jarring, Electric, Invigorating, Flat, Lacking, Dull, Zesty
2. Sweetness: Like acidity, reliably guessing how sweet a wine is takes practice. When speaking about how dry a wine is, we are referring exclusively to how much sugar the wine contains. Your palate is easily fooled by fruity aromas. Fruit in nature tend to be quite sweet so when you smell peach in a wine you brain might tell you the wine is sweet even if there’s no sugar at all. Pay attention.
Two major components of wine worth mentioning here are glycerol and alcohol. When in large enough quantities these compounds can make a wine taste sweeter than it actually is. The former is responsible for wine’s texture, adding a richness and weight, while the latter shockingly tastes sugary when diluted appropriately.
It’s also worth mentioning that the presence of sugar has nothing to do with the quality of the wine. Dry wines are not better than sweet wines. Provided the wine is balanced, sweetness can be a wonderful companion for spicy or umami foods. All grape varieties can be made into dry or sweet wine; it is merely a winemaker’s stylistic decision. If a wine isn’t labeled as sweet, it is most likely dry.
Quantify: Low, Moderate, High
Quality: Pleasant, Unctuous, Rich, Honeyed, Jammy, Cloying, Sugary, Confected, Syrupy, Thick, Decadent
3. Bitterness: When it comes to wine, bitterness is usually attributed to phenolic compounds like tannins. Certain grape varieties have higher tannin levels than others - Sagrantino has much higher tannins than Schiava for instance - but winemaking can play a role as well. When well-managed, tannins add a beautiful texture to the wine, balancing fruity flavours and glycerol resulting in a more composed, complex wine.
Tannins also act as a preservative, promoting a wine’s longevity. Slowly and surely tannins will combine with one another and become too heavy to remain suspended in the wine. They will eventually fall to the bottom of the bottle as sediment leaving behind a silkier wine. When assessing a wine this can give you hints as to how long a wine might age or whether it’s too young for optimal drinking.
These phenolic compounds tend to be easy to notice, usually leaving your mouth feeling dry. You can run your tongue along your teeth a few seconds after tasting a wine to get a better idea of how tannic it is - drier usually indicates higher tannins.
Quantify: Low, Moderate, High
Quality: Bitter, Astringent, Silky, Harsh, Suede, Black Tea, Intense, Rustic, Fine Grained, Blocky, Persistent, Angular, Jagged, Round, Supple, Chewy, Soft, Gentle, Forgiving
4. Alcohol: Like all the other factors, Alcohol in itself is not an indicator of quality, but it is part of the puzzle. High alcohol wines can be harsh, fiery on the back of your throat, hard to drink, and one dimensional, but they can also taste sweet, rich, and warming if balanced correctly. Inversely, wines with low alcohol can be thin, diluted, and short lived, or quaffable, light on their feet, and ethereal.
I often find it easiest to detect Alcohol after I’ve swallowed. It tends to warm the back of my throat, and as I breath out the volatilized alcohol I’ll notice that heat again.
Quantify: Low, Moderate, High
Quality: Hot, Fiery, Spicy, Warming, Harsh, Subtle, Integrated, Distracting, Overwhelming, Smooth, Soft
5. Texture: The way a wine actually feels in your mouth has always been hard to explain. This component is partially a summation of all our other factors (Acids, Sugars, Tannins, Alcohols) and partially its own nebulous category. The classic descriptor is that a light-bodied wine is similar to the texture of skim milk, while a full-bodied wine is similar to the texture of whole milk.
Quantify: Light, Moderate, Full
Quality: Round, Buoyant, Linear, Direct, Pointy, Oily, Thick, Round, Supple, Gentle, Inflated, Meek, Frail, Tight, Tense, Nervous, Focused, Voluminous, Rotund, Ovoid, Angular, Dense, Hollow, Spectral, Ethereal, Gossamer, Stoic, Obtuse.
Step 4: Conclusion
Once you’ve analyzed what is physically in the glass you can start making conclusions. Some of these assessments will be personal, while others can be more objective. A wine’s quality is the culmination of everything that influences your experience.
Complexity: This factor doesn’t only take the volume of aromas into consideration, but how they function with one another. Adding 30 ingredients to a dish doesn’t necessarily make it better, but if you can seamlessly intertwine that many components you might have something truly unique and inspiring on your hands.
Balance: Ask yourself how well each structural component is offset by a complimentary component. If a wine is high in tannin but has enough richness and fruit to counteract the astringency, the wine may be exceptionally balanced. Conversely, a wine can be balanced even if it emphasizes a singular component - the acidity in a dry German Riesling is balanced under a different context, more like a Ballerina than a Wrestler. Symmetry is not synonymous with balance.
Drinkability: Wine is a beverage that is meant to be consumed. If a wine is incredibly delicious after one drop but you couldn’t possibly take another sip, is it really performing its duty of refreshment? Different wine styles are meant to be consumed in different quantities, but it’s worth taking into consideration.
Deliciousness: Often left out of tasting rubrics, how enjoyable you find a wine should hugely influence your final assessment. The wine industry has perpetuated the popularity of unpleasant wines merely because they are balanced or complex when few people actually find them tasty. This category is obviously completely subjective but that doesn’t make it any less valid. It’s important to understand when others may enjoy a wine and equally important for you to be able to reliably predict your enjoyment of a wine from someone else’s tasting note.
Typicity: A wine should taste like it’s expected to. If a wine is made from a particular grape variety, from a particular place, from a particular vintage, it should reflect those factors. Furthermore, if a wine is intended to be in a particular style (Fresh & Fruity, Bold & Savoury, etc.) it should taste that way. Accuracy is underrated.
Cleanliness: There is a long list of potential wine faults caused by poor winemaking, poor farming, bad luck, or terroir. When managed correctly or integrated seamlessly, some flavours dubbed faults can actually add to the final wine. We each have a different threshold for these compounds; what you find appealing others may find despicable. It’s important to calibrate your palate to accurately identify and describe these faults even if you find them charming in certain cases.
Cork Taint: Caused by a bleach eating microorganism, this fault is undeniably unfortunate. It occurs mainly when a contaminated cork comes in contact with a wine post-bottling. The compound TCA is responsible for an aroma of wet dog, dank basement, or soggy cardboard. ‘Corked’ is only an appropriate descriptor for this particular fault despite many wine novices using it as a catch-all for wine faults in general.
Light Struck: Wine can change drastically when exposed to UV radiation for short periods. Clear bottles allow most of this radiation through resulting in aromas of green onion and dried garlic. Avoid storing wine near sunlight.
Volatile Acidity: Caused by the same bacteria that make vinegar, this compound is literally acid you can smell. In can smell of pickles, or even the acrid sweetness of poor balsamic. In small amounts it can add lift and energy to the wine, but too much can be distracting.
Ethyl Acetate: This compound is particularly offensive to many wine drinkers. Its aromas of nail polish remover and varnish often cause pain in the nose. It is fortunately quite rare in modernity, but when present it can render a wine undrinkable.
Reduction: This vast array of flavours all come from volatile sulphur compounds. Most are excreted by yeast as they struggle to ferment the grape must. It is particularly prevalent in vineyards with low nutrient availability and musts with low pHs. At best it can add an inviting aroma of struck match, flint, or soothing hot springs, but at its worst it will remind you of boiled cabbage, overcooked eggs, and indigestion. Many of the world’s most sought after wines are moderately reductive.
Brettanomyces: This particular strain of yeast is prized in beer making but is generally avoided in the wine world. It is responsible for the aroma of bandages, horse sweat, and manure many of us enjoy if sparingly present. High pH musts and a lack of cleanliness in the winery are often cited as sources although resent research points to the vineyard.
Pediococause: This strain of bacteria is probably to blame for ropiness, a fault in which the wine develops the texture of mucus. These slimy wines are full of exopolysaccharides which make the wine unpleasantly thick. It is rare to see these wines on the market, but it does happen on occasion.
Oxidation: Providing a wine with the correct amount of oxygen over its lifetime is paramount. Too little and the yeast will go dormant leaving the juice to spoil. Too much and your wine will be short lived with dull, two dimensional flavours. Oxidation can happen during winemaking, ageing, or in the bottle if the closure isn’t airtight. Try leaving a bottle open on your counter for a week - you’ll understand oxidation instantly.
Maderization: Chemical reactions take place quicker at warmer temperatures. If a wine is stored in a warm environment it will age prematurely and taste cooked, flat, and dull. This usually happens if a wine is shipped without temperature control or is stored improperly after purchase by a consumer.
Mouse Taint: Poorly understood, mousiness is a fault you can taste but can’t smell. Long after you swallow or spit the wine an acrid flavour of stale corn chips, rancid hazelnuts, or dirty rodent cage will linger on your palate. Roughly half of wine drinkers have the correct mouth pH to detect this fault, the others are blissfully ignorant thanks to a fortunate genetic quirk.
Sample Tasting Note
Meinklang Burgenlandweiß: This wine a clear, pale lemon-green in the glass. The nose is playful with aromas of crisp green apple, kiwi flesh, lime zest, pear blossom, fresh sweetgrass, and shiso. The palate is dry with bright fruity acidity. It is light weight with a gossamer texture - like fog dissipating in the early morning sun over a sweet smelling spring meadow. There are flavours of lemongrass, spruce tips, and river stones on the finish. Despite its joyousness, it is quite complex with bell-tone clarity. It is free from faults and is eminently drinkable.
Thanks You: Tasting, like any other skill, improves with practice. Nobody is born a good taster, only mindful repetition will help you achieve your potential. Although this document is incomplete and cursory, I hope it helps you appreciate wine more than you already do. If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out.