Wine Tasting 101: Learn the Basics of Tasting Wine Like a Sommelier

Wine tasting: you may have that one friend who always swirls and sniffs his wine before he tastes it. Or a friend who holds up her glass to examine the wine before taking a sip. And after observing these friends, you may wonder, “Do I really know how to taste wine properly?” This article provides an easy beginner guide to wine tasting like a pro.

If you don’t know how to taste wine, swirling, slurping, and sniffing seems unnecessary and pretentious. But when you know what to look for, you will see that there is a method to the madness. These small things we do that seem silly to help us better experience our wine and learn the vocabulary surrounding wine tasting is for your own benefit. The tips and techniques shared with you in this article are tools to help you identify why you like one wine and don’t like another so you can purchase a bottle of wine that you know you’ll enjoy and become a pro at wine tasting.

How to Taste Wine: Look, Smell, Sip

Drinking wine is about more than flavor. How the wine appears in the glass, how it smells, and the different tastes and textures all contribute to how we experience it. Don’t know what to be on the lookout for? Read on.

Tip 1 for wine tasting: Look

First, you should note the color of the wine – not just red or white, but how deep the color is. A deeper, darker color is usually an indication of how rich and full-bodied the wine will be. For example, a deeper, darker red, like a Bordeaux, is going to be very rich and complex in flavor. A lighter red color wine indicates a type of wine that is more acidic and not as complex, such as a Pinot Noir.

Then you swirl the wine — there are a couple of reasons you do this. In the case of looking at the wine, you do it because it shows us the wine’s legs. The legs are the little droplets that are left on the side of the glass once you’ve finished swirling it. The longer the droplets remain and the slower they travel down the glass, the higher the alcohol content, and the higher the alcohol content, the more flavorful the wine.

Tip 2 for wine tasting: Smell

The second reason you swirl the wine is to make it easier to smell it. When you swirl the wine, you oxygenate it, making it so the aroma can more easily transfer from your glass into your nose. For some people, it is best to take short sniffs to best experience the scents. Others may want to keep their mouths slightly open while taking a long sniff.

There are three different types of smells you need to look out for when you sniff a glass of wine: primary aromas, secondary aromas, and tertiary aromas. The primary aroma is usually the first scent that will stick out to you. It’s the smell that comes directly from the grapes of the wine and is also related to the climate where it comes from. This will typically be either a fruity smell, an herbal smell, or a floral smell.

Secondary aromas come from the way the wine is processed. Because this has to do with the fermentation process, it will be a yeast-like scent. This means you’ll often smell something bready, cheese-like, or nutty in your wine.

The tertiary aroma comes from aging and how the wine is bottled. When people say that the wine is “oaky,” it’s because it has taken on a particular scent from the oak barrels in which it aged. Other common descriptors of tertiary aromas are vanilla, spices, cedar, and leather.

Tip 3 for wine tasting: Sip

Once you’ve looked and smelled your wine, you are ready to taste wine, but just a bit. You will enjoy the taste even more since you’ve put in the time to observe and smell your wine. How you taste your wine can be categorized into how you experience the flavor, texture, and length of the sip.

The flavor is entirely dependent on the grapes. Because of the vine variety, your wine will always have a sour quality, but some wines are much more bitter than others. Wines with high acidities will be much less sweet than wines with lower acidities. Being able to identify this characteristic in wine will help you determine whether you gravitate towards sweeter or drier wines.

The texture of the wine can also be a factor that turns people off of certain kinds. The higher the alcohol content corresponds with a richer taste. In some red wines, because of the bitter tannin from the grape skin, the texture of the wine is more scratchy or dry in the mouth.

Then there’s the length. Often, when we drink wine, we only pay attention to the aftertaste because that’s the sensation that stays with us longest. But next time you take a sip of wine, notice that the initial taste of the wine that first hits your tongue morphs into a different flavor before you swallow and leaves with the final aftertaste. In this way, every sip of wine is like experiencing a unique story that has its own beginning, middle, and end.

Final Thoughts

Now, the next time you have a glass of wine, you have the tools to determine why you like it or don’t like it. If you need help, the best way to get better at it is to practice — try a bunch of different wines back to back and note the differences in them. Soon, you will know which kinds of wines you enjoy, elevate your wine tasting expertise, and you’ll never again have to regret choosing a bottle that wasn’t your favorite.

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