How To Taste Fine Wine
Unless you have studied wine formally, the task of trying to taste fine wine can be daunting, even for the most experienced of fine wine lovers. The exponential growth in wine course offerings—particularly from the world’s leading educator, the Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET)—does mean that there are more people who know how to taste and assess wine than ever before. However, wine education teaches you to taste academically in order to pass exams. You learn how to identify grape varieties, regions of origin and wine quality in blind wine tasting assessments. For those who have neither the time nor the inclination to study, below I have outlined some easy steps that will help you appreciate and, more importantly, enjoy your experience tasting fine wines.
What’s the point of wine tasting?
Ultimately, wine is consumed for pleasure and appreciation. Nothing more, nothing less. If you really want to appreciate a work of fine art, a sophisticated wristwatch or a supercar, you need to invest time and energy to do so. That’s why so many top collectors are ‘geeks’—a word that positively describes the collector’s all-consuming passion and understanding of the product they love. Without putting in the hours, you will never really appreciate and extract maximum pleasure from the product.
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Fine wine is certainly no different, and indeed, the vast array of wines, wine regions, grape varieties and vintage variations means that a true fine wine geek is very likely to be on the spectrum (or at least my wife thinks so). For non-geeks, however, there is no need to be put off. You can still enjoy these products and engage with them at a level where you can gain a lot of pleasure—as long as you are willing to try.
Before I go into the big three questions you need to answer when tasting fine wine, a word about glass swirling. When I first started out as a fine wine lover some twenty years ago, I could not properly swirl my wine glass. Many white shirts and expensive neckties were ruined by my appalling inability to swirl. Even now, I can get it wrong and feel like an idiot. Swirling is important to introduce oxygen into the wine, allowing for chemical reactions to take place between the various acids and phenolic compounds. By doing so, the aromas that are suppressed in a near-oxygen free environment inside the bottle will be released: what professionals refer to as allowing the wine to ‘open up’.
So how to swirl? The key is to hold the stem of the glass between your thumb and index finger in the middle of the stem, with the bottom of the glass resting in the palm of your hand at a slight angle. Don’t hold too tight. Then gently start moving the stem around in a counter-clockwise (if right-handed) or clockwise (if left-handed) fashion. Bingo! You should now be able to swirl the glass with a bit of practice.
A few tips. Never fill the glass beyond the quarter-mark. Practice with water at home before you head to the restaurant. The choice of glassware is key, but is such a big topic that it deserves its own article.
The Three Big Questions
* Does this wine give me pleasure?
* How much pleasure does this wine give me?
* Why does this wine give me pleasure?
If you can answer these three questions, then you can taste fine wine.
Does this wine give me pleasure?
Although it sounds easy, the reality is that your tastes will change as you become more experienced as a wine taster. What gave you pleasure last year might give you very little this year. The normal journey of taste begins when you are younger and less experienced with wine: you are likely to gain pleasure from big, bold, full-bodied wines, often that have a distinctive aroma derived from the wood barrels that the wine has been matured in. The reason is obvious. Your palate is not yet able to identify the nuances and complexities that exist in finer, more subtle wines. It takes time to start identifying these and appreciating them. Once you do, you will find that the big oaky fruit-bombs that you used to adore are suddenly undrinkable.
When you are more experienced, wines that give you pleasure will be those that are more finely balanced and complex. The key components of the wine will be in balance with each other: alcohol, acidity, sweetness and flavor, and for red wine, the tannins (that come from the grape skins and oak barrels the wine has been matured in) will be fine-grained and well-integrated into the wine. This does not necessarily mean that high alcohol wines (14.5 percent + ABV) will become off-limits: just that wines with high alcohol content will be balanced with the other components so that you will not feel the ‘heat’ of the alcohol. Fine wines that will give you the most pleasure will be those that evolve and change in the glass, exhibit several layers of complexity that you can now identify, and have a long, satisfying finish that stays in your memory long after you have finished the wine.
As we move into older age, our sensory functions start to fade. Our sense of smell and ability to detect flavors weaken. Which means older people will find it harder to enjoy the more subtle wines, gaining pleasure instead from similar styles of wine that they liked in their inexperienced youth, although they will still be able to identify quality and most likely be drawn to the better examples of these types of wines.
A tip: don’t get hung up with trying to identify the specific aromas and tastes. Ultimately, who cares whether the wine smells of blackberry or red cherry, dark or white chocolate, roses or white flowers? We all perceive the chemical compounds found in wine differently, and it will detract from your enjoyment of the moment if your brain is scrambling to correctly identify exact aromas and taste descriptors. If they come naturally, so be it. But don’t stress about irrelevant stuff when you could be savoring your wine.
How much pleasure does this wine give me?
I use just three descriptors to give my overall assessment of a wine: ‘amazing’, ‘good’ or ‘poor’. All wines I have ever drunk, am drinking or will ever drink ultimately fall within these buckets in my memory bank. The first and the third are fairly definitive. The middle—‘good’—bucket is where the vast bulk of fine wines fall. With that bucket, my facial expressions and the way I say ‘good’ indicates whether the wine falls in the top, middle or bottom part of the scale. Unfortunately, far less than five percent of the wines I taste fall into the ‘amazing’ bucket for the simple reason that, as you become more experienced (and spoiled) tasting so many fine wines, the bar to reach ecstatic enjoyment levels rises ever higher. Such is the dilemma for any fine wine addict.
Assessing how much pleasure the wine gives you is, therefore, a purely comparative exercise. Consciously or unconsciously, your memory is furiously assessing how this wine stacks up to all the others you have tasted. Your brain is analyzing how complex the aroma is, how the ‘attack’ of the wine is when it enters your mouth, how it feels in the mid-palate when it washes over your tongue and, finally, how long and satisfying the finish is. After weighing all of this up in a nanosecond, one side of your brain will communicate to the other side how much pleasure this wine gives you relative to all others you can remember tasting.
Why does this wine give you pleasure?
Let’s not underestimate the environmental and incidental considerations of where and when you are tasting the wine. If you ever get the opportunity to taste a wine from Domaine de la Romanée Conti in the estate cellar with the vigneron (winemaker), I promise you the wine will taste heavenly and you will never forget it for the rest of your life. If you spend the month of January ‘dry’—as many wine lovers and wine professionals do for reasons I have never been able to fathom—your first glass of fine wine on 1st February will taste incredible. If you attend a fine wine dinner and happen to be sitting next to the guest winemaker, your brain will find a way of making sure you love their wine.
Outside of these factors, the reasons why a wine will give you pleasure will all likely be indicative of one assessment: is the wine fine? (There is a reason, after all, why the category is called ‘fine wine’.)
Fine wines are those that evoke some type of emotional response. For example, the emotion could come from recognizing the sense of place in the wine—what the French call ‘terroir’. For instance, “This glass of Harlan Estate is so recognizable as being from Harlan”, or “This glass of Domaine Duroché Chambertin Clos de Bèze can only have come from the Chambertin Clos de Bèze Grand Cru vineyard”. In these instances, the wine in hand is a fine example of that specific winery or vineyard.
The best of all wine emotions is the “wow” moment. All fine wine lovers have had it, otherwise they wouldn’t be lovers. The “wow” moment is when you taste a wine and it takes you to a different place: your eyes light up, and you start looking at the glass and wondering what the heck you just drunk, even though you know precisely well what was poured in your glass. Thankfully, I have had many such moments, but still crave more every time I open a bottle. Here is one personal example.
It was at the annual La Paulée celebration (after-harvest party) in Burgundy a few years ago. All invitees must bring as many great bottles of wine to share with each other as they can fit in their suitcase. One of the wines I had brought with me was a treasured bottle of the legendary Henri Jayer Echézeaux Grand Cru 1985. I opened it, smelled the cork to ensure there was no taint, then poured myself a small glass to check the wine. Wow, wow, wow. The wine had such incredible purity, an indescribable complex ‘nose’ (the word often used to describe the aromas), the most delicate but powerful mid-palate, and a finish that literally went on for several minutes that I can still remember it today. A friend came up to me as I was savouring the taste and asked me what I was so happy about. I was overjoyed. My face had a perma-grin. I will never forget it. That was ecstasy in a glass.
Lewis Chester DipWSET is a London-based wine collector, member of the Académie du Champagne and Chevaliers du Tastevin, co-founder of Liquid Icons and, along with Sasha Lushnikov, co-founder of the Golden Vines? Awards. He is also Honorary President and Head of Fundraising at the Gérard Basset Foundation, which funds diversity & inclusivity education programs globally in the wine, spirits & hospitality sectors.
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