I always get a kick from watching people taste wine. Like walking and talking, it tells a lot about what people think of themselves.It can be a ritual, a tool or a performance. I remember working at the Exhibition of Victorian Winemakers in Melbourne when a snappily-dressed young blade confronted me with doe-eyed lady in tow. Obviously determined to use the occasion to impress, D’Artagnan asked me for couple of dry whites to taste. Equal to the occasion I ceremoniously uncorked a young Riesling with as much flair as my tightly-fitting suitcoat would allow, before splashing just the right amount into each glass from an impressive distance. It was his grip on the implements that first worried me, each fist clamped firmly around the bowl of the glass, with palms so damp with sweat that I thought I had discovered my first frosted tasting-glasses. Act One was to lower each nostril in turn directly over the wine, each giving an almost imperceptible sniff. Since this feat was accomplished from a distance of around eighteen inches, it suggested extreme ability in the nasal department. Act Two was the taste test, achieved with a minimum of fuss, a tiny drop swallowed with the speed of medecine. Some wine remained in his glass. The colour? Ignoring the plain white card I had out out for the purpose, he laid it flat against the palm of his hand, peering through the mugginess to examine the wine. Exercise complete, and feeling obliged to leave me with his thoughts, he told me that the Riesling lacked all manner of flavour and looked to have a pink tinge. And then with an abrupt wheel he left me to terrorise Tisdalls. So nearly there. D’Artagnan did recognise that there are three aspects to tasting wine – the appearance, the nose and the palate – but he fell apart with the practicalities. That was a shame, because they’re not so difficult. You begin by looking at the wine. Use a clear glass, shaped like a tulip and without cuts or grooves. Grab 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. Reds begin purple, moving to purple-red, red, red-brown, and finally to that tawny brown, usually suggesting that its teeth have well and truly fallen out. 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 nose is next. If you’ve seen the concentrated sniffing of professional tasters at work you may be forgiven if you thought there was glue inside them glasses. This bit looks terribly impressive, but it works. 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? And don’t worry, you’ll get used to the way people look at you. 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 Rhine 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 familiarizing oneself with what to look for. As wine ages, its bouquet becomes softer as its different components blend together in a harmonious way. With excessive age, it goes flat, loses its quality and tends to be come dominated by a single flavour. Wines that are too old have a dull, toffee-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 – and 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. And finally, the taste. Do this with confidence and a degree of aggression. Take a good mouthful of wine, there’s no sense in mucking around with a `polite’ sip. Now 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, which also happens to be the place where you detect smell. Once again, it’s like turning up the intensity of flavour. 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. 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 as they corrode away your mouth lining. Don’t be too worried, I don’t think that anyone has ever requried surgery as a result.
