How to taste Wine - My private Wine Class -For Lovers and Explorers

As I am a professional in wine business I also speak another language. To teach people about wine is one of my missions. The ability to taste and describe a wine is extremly difficult for newcomers in the world of wine. So I decided to arrgange private wine tastings with five premium wines to teach people how to taste wine properly.

Now I want to share some of the experiences I made with my students in pictures and to explain more and more about the tasting procedure on steemit for the steemit community. It is a pleasure to taste different wines in a row, so that you also have the possiblity of comparison.

Foto made by photographer @algazarra (A very strong and unique personality of arts, with eyes for special moments) you can see the interactive wine class with my student from Brasil, enjoying a Portuguese full bodied red wine.

My first lesson for today for Steemers is the three step system, how to taste and analyse a wine. Especially when you are in a restaurant and you are the one who has to decide if the wine is good to serve or not.

Three steps are needed to taste a wine properly:

1. LOOK:
   Check out the color, opacity, and viscosity (wine legs). A lot of clues about a wine are buried in its appearance, but unless you’re tasting blind, most of the answers that those clues provide will be found on the bottle for example the vintage and the grape variety. Try to describe the color as it is also an indicator for the taste. Lighter wines are mostly fresh than darker ones.

2. SMELL:
   When you first start smelling wine, think big to small. Can you detect any special fruit flavours? Think of broad categories first like citrus, orchard, or tropical fruits in whites and for tasting reds, red fruits, blue fruits, or black fruits. Broadly, you can divide the nose of a wine into three primary categories:

Primary Aromas are grape-derivative and include fruits, herbs, and floral notes.

Secondary Aromas come from winemaking practices. The most common aromas are yeast-derivative and are most easy to spot in white wines: cheese rind, nut husk (almond, peanut), or stale beer.

Tertiary Aromas come from aging, usually in bottle, or possibly in oak. These aromas are mostly savory: roasted nuts, baking spices, vanilla, autumn leaves, old tobacco, cured leather, cedar, and even coconut.

Last Step - TASTE:
Taste is how we use our tongues to observe the wine, but also, once you swallow the wine, the aromas may change because you’re receiving them retro-nasally, which means our taste is hollistic - it works only when nose and mouth work together.
Our tongues can detect salty, sour, sweet, or bitter and in addition to that umami. All wines are going to have some sour, because grapes all inherently have some acid. Some varieties are known for their bitterness and it manifests as a sort of light, pleasant tonic-water-type flavor. Some white table wines have a small portion of their grape sugars retained, and this adds natural sweetness. You can’t ever smell sweetness though, since only your tongue can detect it.
Very important is the texture - Your tongue can “touch” the wine and perceive its texture. Texture in wine is related to a few factors, but an increase in texture is almost always happens in a higher-alcohol, riper wine. Ethanol gives a wine texture because we perceive it as “richer” than water. We also can detect tannin with our tongue, which are that sand-paper or tongue-depressor drying sensation in red wines.

So dear Steemers. I hope you learned some intersting insider tipps today and you start to train your wine knowledge.
The more wines you taste, the more comparison you have. So cheers to You!

Merci and enjoy your day,

W.Vanity

A last picture of me holding a special, typical Portuguese bottle. A simple white wine from Porugal, with a label drawn by a German artist. With low acidity and citric fruits.

Sources: I recommend the page wine folly to read more into detail and to know all about wine. I use it as a reference but it is still very specific and for wine experts. :) (www.winefolly.com)