The Tasting Glass There is nothing more unsuited to drinking wine from than the pewter chalice, the indelicately-hewn and cumbersome cut crystal icon, the ceramic goblet or the gilt-rimmed souvenir glass, colourfully stamped with a rampant male Bird of Paradise in the height of mating season. Let me also decry all use of another abominable vessel usually found only in reception centres, the Champagne saucer – that hub-cap-shaped monstrosity allegedly originally modelled on a certain portion of Marie-Antoinette’s anatomy. All they are capable of is rendering a wonderfully sparkling beverage into a state of complete stillness in around twenty seconds flat. Champagne glasses should be tall and narrow, and the best are called flutes. They retain the bubbles and their height displays the natural effervescence to its best advantage. For the still wines there is a standard wine glass specified by the International Standards Organisation, which provides the perfect means for tasting most wines. What makes the ISO glass so good are the following attributes. The height of the bowl is around 100mm above its stem of 55mm. The diameter of the base and of the bowl at its widest part is 65mm. The narrow diameter of the open top is 46mm. The glass is clear and fine, so you have a good view of what you are drinking. Wine colour and clarity is important, and cut crystal, pewter or other metalware make these features impossible to pick up. The glass has an elegant and strong stem, with which you can hold it without fear of it breaking off after a couple of vigorous swirls. When you hold glasses by the stem the heat of your hand won’t warm white wines up above their desired serving temperature, and your perspiration won’t smear the bowl, which can make determining clarity a trifle difficult if you’re feeling nervous. The shape of the bowl tapers inwards as it goes up, in the shape of a closed tulip. Both elegant and functional, this means that the wine’s aromas and scents are retained above the surface of the liquid, where they can easily be detected once your nose is dipped inside. Technical or Hedonistic? There are two attitudes we can take when tasting wine. We can, like most people, say that a wine is as good as the amount of pleasure it gives us, which is a hedonistic approach to the concept. Or, like a professional, we can evaluate a wine for its conformation to the specifications of its style, and the presence or absence of faults. Let’s call this a ‘technical’ approach to tasting. If we all taste wine this way, and our own opinions of whether we like it or not don’t matter, we can be much more objective about the whole thing. Clearly, the two attitudes will overlap to a small degree. The Appearance of Wine Tasting wine can be a ritual, a tool or a performance. There are three aspects of wine that require evaluation – the appearance, the nose and the palate. You begin by looking at the wine. Use a clear glass, shaped like a tulip and without cuts or grooves. Hold it by the stem – that way the bowl stays clear and you don’t warm wines above their serving temperature with the heat of your hand. Fill your glass to the point at which it is at its widest and tilt it against a white background, preferably in a well-lit place. You can see that the colours in the wine become easier to detect in this fashion. White wines tend to begin life with a green colour, after which with age they move to straw and then yellow, finally to a yellow-amber and brown, at which stage it is usually time to return them to the earth from whence they came. Wood-matured whites are often released with a more advanced colour, resulting from the slow and controlled oxidation they experience in the casks, which is a form of ageing itself. A wine’s depth of colour helps tell your mouth what to expect, for in many cases in the winemaking process, colour and body are determined at the same step. When grape juice is left in contact with the skins it extracts tannins and pigments naturally found therein. The longer this contact, the more colour in the finished wine. And so deep, richly coloured reds suggest a generous proportion of tannin and other natural components. Tannin has a very powerful bitter, astringent taste, which makes you want to pucker up your mouth. Full-bodied wines owe their ‘heaviness’ in part to their tannin content, so it is safe to generalise that deeply coloured reds are more full-bodied, and that lighter-bodied wines appear paler and thinner. Wines made from non-irrigated fruit in particularly hot years could also have a deeper colour than would be expected from a cooler ripening season. Reds begin purple, moving to purple-red, red, red-brown, and finally to that tawny brown, which usually suggests they’re past it. There’s no fixed rate of colour change, but it is strongly linked with the development of flavour. Unlike whites, which get deeper in colour as they age, the colour of reds tends to become less intense. Rose wines are best when drunk young, while their colour is still that desirable rose-salmon shade, but not an artificial pink. A wine should not look cloudy, hazy, ropy, muddy or any of the colours not previously mentioned. It should appear brilliantly clear. Test this by holding up your glass and looking straight through it from (a) the sides and (b) the top. Bits of cork, crystal or sediment (which is usually the same colour as the wine itself) in the wine are no cause for alarm. Simply take a little care in pouring or decanting to avoid confronting them in the glass. The Scents of Wine The nose is next. Hold the glass by its stem and swirl the wine around once or twice. Put you nose right inside (remember, you didn’t fill it to the top) and take a large sniff before the wine has stopped moving. Isn’t that more intense? A wine’s smell can be divided into those flavours derived from its ‘grapiness’ or aroma, and those flavours which result from the wine’s own development, by flavouring compounds formed as flavours break down and recombine within the wine, collectively known as the bouquet. Young wines show a dominance of aroma in their nose, and older, more developed wines will have almost 100% bouquet. The aromas and bouquets of classic grape varieties, like Cabernet Sauvignon and Riesling, are remarkably consistent from wine to wine (in good examples, but don’t expect then to be the same ) and can become quite identifiable by the drinker. It becomes a matter of familiarising oneself with what to look for. As wine ages, its bouquet becomes softer and more complex as its different components blend together in a harmonious way. Acids combine with the alcohol (ethanol) in wine to form volatile, scented esters. Depending on whether you prefer young or old wines, this may be a good thing. Typical ‘mature’ smells are honeyed, toasty, oily and spicy bouquets. With excessive age, the bouquet goes flat, loses its quality and tends to become dominated by a single flavour. A wine that is too old may have a dull, sherry-like nose, or may even smell like vinegar, in which case it has gone acetic. The nose is a great aid in the detection of winemaking faults. Smells of decaying vegetables, old socks, burnt rubber, onion-skins or foreign objects often signal disaster. Some faults are tolerated a little more than others, largely because as individual people we have our own threshold level to smells before we can detect them, which vary as enormously as we are all different. The Taste of Wine And finally, the taste. Do this with confidence and a degree of aggression. Take a good mouthful of wine and purse your lips slightly and draw a little air in, which will evaporate volatile wine flavours and shoot them up to the olfactory centre underneath your brain, where you detect smells. Once again, it’s like turning up the intensity of flavour. Tasting: the olfactory senses The olfactory appreciation of wine takes place through the nostrils and also from behind the soft palate. 1. Front sinus 2. Olfactory bulb 3. Nasal cavities 4. Vapour rising directly through the nostrils 5. Roof of mouth 6. Upper lip 7. Soft palate 8. Vapour rising from behind soft palate. The tasting ability of your mouth is extremely restricted, and most of the perception of wine flavour takes place as I have just described. Apart from being able to detect ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ flavours like curry and mint, the tongue can only distinguish four things: sweetness at its tip, saltiness at its front sides, acidity along the sides and bitterness across the back. Fruitiness in wine is essential. It is also important to be able to taste wine down the length of the palate, and for a wine to be tasted after spat out or swallowed (its persistence). Fruit flavours are generally tasted towards the front of the mouth, where you can also detect if the wine is sweet or dry. Acidity and sweetness are frequently capable of rendering the other less noticeable, often to the point when you wonder if the other is there at all. It is also possible to mistake a wine’s fruitiness for sweetness, which is a trap when trying to describe them. Acid is essential in all wine – in addition to the freshness and tang it gives to round off flavour, it is also a preservative against bacteria. Wines lacking acid taste fat, flabby and overly broad, before falling away and finishing short in the mouth. Tannins can be derived from the skins, stalks and seeds of grapes, and some can be picked up from new oak barrels if the wine is matured or fermented in wood. Although wood tannins are generally softer, both are generally detected by the rasping, bitter taste (more of a sensation, really) that puckers up the inside of your mouth. It helps the wine to age, and over a period of years will combine with other natural constituents of wine and deposit in the bottle. Sometimes tannin can be particularly noticeable at the back, sides and underside of the tongue. Consider the way a wine finishes when you swallow it, or as the case may be, spit it out. Good wines finish crisply and clearly, without fuzzy flavours hanging around. Poor wines may leave you with a taste quite unlike the wine itself. Premium wines have a good length of persistent flavour. Disappointing wines disappear instantly, whereas really great wines can still be tasted half an hour later. To tie up these different aspects of wine, it is important to consider how well they all interact together. If some features of the wine completely dominated all the others, it can be described as unbalanced. An unbalanced wine is either just not ready for drinking, or else a poor wine. Many only become well-balanced when they reach maturity, which may take several years. Appearance and Colour White wines are often described using the following terms: colourless, green, straw, yellow, linked to the words pale, golden, dark and gold. There is also white gold, pale gold, red gold and bronze gold. Older wines may be termed topaz, burnt topaz, maderised, amber, brown, caramel, mahogany or black. Rose wines are often termed grey, light red, ‘partridge eye’, rose or violet; and older roses may be described as rose yellow, rose orange, russet, salmon pink or even having the colour of onion skin. Red wines are often described as purple, light violaceous, dark, garnet, ruby, vermillion or black; and older reds are termed bisque, orange, brick-red or maroon. Tasting: Harmony and Balance The first of a wine’s sensations on the palate is the attack, which should be clean, natural and precise. Wines made from hot areas may lack intensity or attack. The wine’s flavours and textures should completely fill the mouth. The impressions left in the aftertaste should continue and prolong the original taste sensation. All the elements of taste have been considered separately so far, but the drinker’s final thought should be ‘how well were they put together?’. If some features of the wine completely dominated all the others, it can be described as unbalanced. This aspect is important, for an unbalanced wine is either just not ready for drinking, or else a poor wine. Many only become well-balanced when they reach maturity, which may take several years. This is why people are inclined to put down their ‘rough’ reds in the cellar, and hope that in time they will become gentle and voluptuous, and will have ‘settled down’. In other words, the wine will have reached the kind of balance at which the winemaker intended for it to be drunk. Odours and Aromas There is also an accepted vocabulary for the various aromatic categories. There are always several aromatic qualities in wine, which is rarely ever able to be described adequately by one alone, even if it is dominant. There are nine principal categories of aromas. Animal odours; game, gamey, venison, meaty, musk, musky, ‘catty’. Balsamic odours; all resins, juniper, turpentine, vanilla, pine, benjamin. Chemical odours; spiritous, acetone, acetic, phenol, carbolic, mercaptan, sulphate, sulphide, lactic. iodised, oxidised, yeast, ferment. Spicy odours; all spices, but frequently clove, laurel, pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, rosemary, liquorice, mint. Floral odours; all flowers, but frequently violet, hawthorn, rose, citronella, jasmine, iris, geranium, acacia, lime. Fruit odours; all fruits, but frequently blackcurrant, raspberry, cherry, grenadine, gooseberry, passionfruit, redcurrant, plum, almond, quince, apricot, banana, nuts, fig. Vegetable and mineral odours; herbaceous, hay, tea, dead leaves, truffle, mushroom, damp straw, damp moss. damp undergrowth, chalk, fern, ivy, grassy, green leaves. Quality and Price It soon becomes clear why some wines are more expensive than others; some in casks, some in bottles. More expensive wines are more complex, with more numerous and more pronounced flavour components. After you try around a bit you will doubtless arrive at the maximum amount you will spend per bottle. The next step is to get the most value out of this price. Shop around. Our own tastes differ as much as what we expect from a drink, and too many of us lose sight of this. There’s no point in paying more for a wine than you’re going to appreciate.
