How to Develop a Wine Palate

Training your wine palate is not just for professional wine tasters and connoisseurs. In fact, all wine drinkers are training their palates everyday just by experiencing different tastes. A trained wine palate simply means that you can recognize the various flavors that you taste in the wines you consume. The more flavors you can successfully identify, the more trained your palate has become. Ultimately your experience with taste is your wine tasting guide.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. Search the Internet or other resources to obtain a list of flavors common to wine such as black pepper, blackberries, apricots and oak. Write these flavors down in your wine journal.

2. Seek out and purchase a small quantity of each item from your list. Many of the items may be purchased at your local grocery store or specialty mart; however, others may require a trip to a nursery, hardware store or other less conventional store.

3. Taste and smell each of the items you have purchased. Try to recall wines you have previously tasted, which may have had hints or notes of the flavor you are tasting.

4. Repeat this process, adding new items occasionally. This will allow your palate to solidify these tastes.

5. Continue to drink a variety of wine types including wines from different regions and countries. This will allow you numerous opportunities to test your palate against a multitude of flavors.

6. Verbalize your thoughts as you drink different wines. By verbalizing thoughts through dialogue, you may gain further understanding of what you are tasting. You may also record your thoughts in your wine journal.

Tips & Warnings

• Training your palate is like training for anything else, the more you do it, the better you are likely to get at it.
• Wine tasting at wineries and wine stores is a great way to meet people who enjoy talking about wine. Such tastings are also a good way to taste a wide variety of wines without breaking the bank.
• Jams and jellies are good for training your palate to recognize a variety of the fruit flavors you are likely to encounter when wine tasting. When you taste jams and jellies, try to stick with organic or preservative free jams and jellies.
• Palate sensitivity does vary from person to person, so even if you can't identify every nuance in your favorite wine, remember that wine enjoyment does not come from the knowledge of what you are tasting, but from the pleasure of the taste.

Resources

• To learn more about the aromas and flavors of wine go to tv.winelibrary.com.

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