The clue to tasting wine is to think as you drink. Do you often just let it slide down without a moment's thought? Most people do. Katherine and I suffer from being at the other extreme. We spend so much of our time thinking about the flavour of what we put inside our mouths that we do it automatically, even if it's only a glass of water or a cup of tea. You look a bit of a prat solemnly taking a mouthful of water and swooshing it round your mouth. We know. We've been there. Anyway, back to the wine-tasting Why bother? Well, you get more pleasure out of tasting wine if you think about it.
You sometimes see people holding up a glass of wine to the light, and examining it closely. You look at wine to see the colour.
Ah, isn't that pretty! No, seriously, to work out if you reckon the wine is in the condition it should be. Young white wine should be light, hardly coloured at all, unless it has spent time in oak barrels, when it might be beginning to get a golden tint. If a white is young, and looks the colour of old gold, it's probably in bad shape. Likewise, if a red is young, it should have a pinkish, even purplish tinge to it. If it is beginning to show a change towards yellow or brown, take it or send it back (make sure you do this against a white, not a yellow, light!).
Then, the sniff. Why? This is your early warning system. There exist, we're afraid to say, wines that are so horrible that you would not want to put them inside your body. To avoid this kind of unpleasantness, grasp your glass firmly by the stem and swirl the wine round in it. But before you do, HANG ON! We didn't tell you the glass should on no account be more than one-third full. Particularly if it's red wine and you're wearing light-coloured clothes. Phew!
Why are you swirling it? To help the molecules of the aromatic compounds break free from the wine and rise to greet your waiting nostrils, because the nose is where most of the work of tasting, as well as smelling, is done. Even though you think your tongue perceives all the flavours when you have the wine in your mouth, t's actually the nose, or, rather, the retro-nasal receptors.
The tongue is much less sophisticated than the nose. It can only do four things, or possibly five. Sweetness, saltiness, sharpness and bitterness. And the fifth one is called umami, discovered by the Japanese a few years ago. Savouriness, as in Marmite, or dried mushrooms, or cheese, or all sorts of things. Everything else happens up in the retro-nasal cavity. That's why it's difficult to tell the difference between orange juice and pineapple juice when you've got a cold. Your tongue can still sense the sweetness and the sharpness of the juices, but your nose is too bunged up to sort out the rest. If you don't believe us, try it. Put a large clothes peg over your nose and try. Should give the family a laugh, if nothing else.
At last, it's time to put the wine in your mouth. No! Don't swallow it! You're supposed to be thinking about it! Now comes a difficult bit. Holding the wine in your mouth, draw air through it. Why are we making this noise like a vacuum cleaner with an upset stomach? To help those old retro-nasal receptors. Drawing air through the wine helps to volatilise some of the aromatic compounds, and send then whizzing up into the retro-nasal cavity. Keep going - don't swallow it yet. Think about the flavours.
What are you looking for? Well, it depends on the wine, but there should be some fruitiness in most wines.
What kind of fruit? Is it citrus (lemon, grapefruit, orange etc), or red fruits (raspberry, strawberry, redcurrant, etc) or black fruits (blackcurrant, blackberry, damson etc)?
If it's white wine, you ought to think about the level of acidity,
the sweetness, or whether it has been fermented or aged in oak barrels. That would give it a creamy richness, and toasty, vanilla flavours. Has it been through malolactic fermen-tation (see Jargon Buster)? This would give butterscotchy, buttery flavours.
Red wines have fruit, they sometimes have oak, but the big difference is tannin (see Jargon Buster). This is that mouth-shrinking feeling. You also get it in stewed tea. If this is in balance with the rest of the wine, it can as a pleasant firmness, as well as helping a red wine age gracefully. But there has to be enough fruit to balance the tannic structure. If not, the wine may still be tough as old boots when the fruit's worn out.
Balance is the most important factor. And, in an expensive wine, there should be lots of different flavours to find and appreciate. That's 'complexity'. And 'length' is the time you can still taste it after you've spat it out. Or swallowed it.
And that's where you have the advantage over us. When we go to a tasting, we spit the wines out. As it happens, we are soon off to the big Tesco tasting for journalists.
There will probably be over 100 wines to taste. If we don't spit, we can't read the notes we've written. But if you're trying two or three wines side by side (and that's the way you really learn, by comparing), it's fine to swallow. Or, as the French say, 'spit backwards'.
Happy tasting!
