Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Wine Tasting 101: Learning the Art of Wine Tasting

By KC Kudra

Wines tasting party is the perfect place to try out your wine tasting skills as well as learn from veteran wine connoisseurs. Wine tasting, contrary to what is usually thought, and is not a lot of people standing around looking chic while sipping, swishing and eying glasses of Napa Valley wines. It is actually an art form that requires a sharp sense of smell, taste, and an eye for the sublime. Mastering the techniques of professional wine tasting can take a great deal of practice and there is always some new technique to learn.

The art of wine tasting is used to distinguish fine wines and relies on a trained palate, often acquired over many years. If stored properly and aged correctly, wine can be an exquisite experience.

Wine tasting is totally dependent upon our sense of smell with more than 3/4 of the impact on our senses tied to the smell prior to even beginning to taste it. Most wine lovers will retell the experiencing of a fine wine and speak more of the wonderful aroma and then the taste. After the smell, it becomes the personal preference of the wine taster.

Proper wine tasting is initiated with the swishing that is most familiar to novices. The purpose of this activity is to circulate the taste of the wine by moving it between the front and back areas of the mouth in order to reach the taste buds contained in the tongue.

Taste buds are not necessarily the main factor, but they do identify food, beverages and as being sweet, salty or bitter. The swishing method, therefore, gives the senses a chance to extract the aromatic flavors in the wine testing process.

Understanding the fundamentals of swishing allows the connoisseur to move on to the three basic principles of the art of judging a fine wine - observing, smelling, and finally tasting.

When the wine is poured, it should be ideally poured into a crystal, clear glass so that the first step - observation - can take place. With the sample in hand, this step should not be rushed and instead, it should be slow, deliberate and the moment, appreciated. White wines, in spite of their name, are actually not completely white ranging in color from golden, pale brown to a slightly tinged shade of green. Red wine, on the other hand, is usually darker with a pink hue that leans toward a darker brown color.

The second step is observation. It is all about the nose and what the wine smells like. This is accomplished through two steps: taking a brief whiff of the wine to get a general idea and then taking a deep, extended inhalation in order to get the full aroma of the beverage.

Wine experts will usually let the aroma waft over them as they reflect on the total experience of the wine up to that point.

After letting it come fully into their consciousness, a wine taster will then take a sip, swish it around to activate all of the taste buds to ascertain the wine and savor it fully prior to swallowing. This method allows all senses to be engaged in the process of taking in the wine, figuring the quality of it. This allows wine growers to figure out if their grapes, distillation process, and procedures used to store it in a wine cellar or storage unit was sufficient to produce a fine quality wine.

Having completed the steps of observing, smelling, and finally tasting the wine, you will then be able to discern the quality of the wine from a connoisseur's standpoint. This is the most comprehensive way to determine the aging, storage, and overall fitness of the wine for consumption. In addition, as with any skill, the more practiced you become, the more adept you will be at evaluating the unique and exciting flavors of this special beverage.

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