Steps You Need To Follow When Indulging In Wine Tasting
September 24th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed
If you are like most people, you think about wine tasting and your mind gets flooded with images of people smelling wine, studying wine, sipping, swilling and spitting their wine out. There is a lot more too it than that. Understand that the type of glass that the wine is in makes a huge difference. There are even methods to hold your glass of wine depending on what you are drinking. Chilled wine should be held by the stem and the bowl should not be held at all. Wines that are served at room temperature requires picking the glass by its bowl and holding cupped in the palm with the stem being held between your two middle fingers. When wine tasting, the wine should be studied by holding the glass at an angle and against a light background at arms length.
Having got the mechanics of holding the wine glass right, your next step in wine tasting is to study the color of the wine as well as its clarity, and though you may be conversant with wines that are only red, white and pink in color, be sure to know that there are many different colors as well that will include colors such as green, gold, yellow, purple and in some instances, even black. And, from the clarity of the wine, you can be sure of what the age of the wine is - with young wines being more see-through types while cloudiness will indicate that something is amiss with the wine.
No doubt, studying the color and clarity of the wine may not have much bearing in how your wine is going to taste, though for a wine tasting connoisseur there is as much joy in holding the wine as there is in tasting it. Another important aspect to wine tasting is the bouquet, which is not a bunch of flowers, but as any wine tasting expert will inform you, is the way that the wine smells.
Thus, you will need to properly hold the wine glass and lower your hand so that the glass is level and then you need to make a rotation of your wrist in order to gently swirl the wine within the wine bowl, though remember that to get the best out of swilling the wine, very little wrist movement is necessary. Swilling the wine brings its aroma to the fore which can then be savored as well as smelled which you can do by bringing the wine glass at the level of your nose and do so in an elegant manner.
So now the day has come, your first wine tasting experience. When tasting wine, one should never guzzle. Dainty sips are the most effective way to get the fuil taste and body of the wine. Take a sip and then close your mouth and gently roll it around with your tongue for a couple of seconds, enjoying the flavor and body. Then let the wine slide down your throat, making sure not to exhale. Basically thats all there is to wine tasting.
Ken
