How To Taste Wine

What skill would you like to learn?

Disclaimer With about ten years of wine experience, I’m not a novice when it comes to wine tasting. I’ve studied it and can write notes of a wine tasting reasonably well sans identifying 20 aromas in one sniff though.

To Taste Or Not To Taste There is a section of wine people who are against the very idea of tasting a wine. For them wine should be savoured for the pleasure of the palate and certainly not subjected to any scientific breakdown of aromas, flavours etc.

My Own Thoughts Whereas to a large extent I subscribe to the above idea however, if you are pursuing wines as a dedicated passion or a profession, then learning to taste wines is an helpful exercise. It widens your understanding of the wine like where it’s coming from, why is it tasting in a particular way, has it been made well, what’s lacking in the wine etc.

Blind Wine Tasting This is where the bottle of wine is covered with a cloth to hide its name and label (some exuberant organisers may also make you taste blindfolded instead). Though this makes wine tasting more challenging but again it’s ok for wine competitions, sommelier championships etc. Personally I’m not a big fan of blind tasting of wines.

What skill would you like to learn?

Having shared my views above, learning to taste wine properly is one skill I would like to learn more, as also to practice writing good wine tasting notes.

What Exactly is Wine Tasting? This must be the question in your mind if you’re not particularly a fan of wines. And even if you know about wines you may think ok, so what’s all the fuss about it?

To quote from BBB Good Food, “Wine tasting is different from drinking purely for pleasure, though it should also be fun. It helps to approach it methodically so you can get as much out of the wine as possible”.

Wine Tasting Notes Also as per Wikipedia “A tasting note is a taster’s written testimony about the aroma, taste identification, acidity, structure, texture, and balance of a wine”.

Wine Tasting Note A sample wine tasting template by WSET Global looks like this:

Why Are You Telling Us All This? Oh well, I got carried away in doing what wine enthusiasts do a lot – donning a wine teacher’s role. Apologies if I sounded like that. All the same I also hope in my heart that you liked reading it.

Now I move on to planning more about how should I go about learning the text book method of tasting wine.

Cheers !!