Wine Tasting

"Hi, I’m Farley and I am here today to talk to you about wine today. I work at Thomas Fogarty Winery up in the Santa Cruz Mountains in California where I work in the tasting room and do other things for them as well involving writing, bottling, and things like that. I also have the introductory level of my sommelier certification. The first thing I would like to talk about is how to taste wine. So once you have the wine in your glass, there are a couple of different things that you need to look for in wine tasting. The first thing is color. Obviously this is a red wine but there are different hues of red. The best way to see it is actually look against a white background and you can look and see if it is dark or light. Lighter wines tend to be lighter body. This one is a bit darker. Then there is the swirl which helps to open up the wine and it helps to bring oxygen into the wine and aerates the wine which allows you to do the next step which is smell the wine. The nose or the bouquet of the wine as it is often referred to is very important in wine tasting because smell and taste are very much connected with the wine. Just as when you have a cold and you can’t smell the food cooking and the taste somehow comes less, the same thing with wine. So when you smell the wine it helps you to taste it better. As you taste the wine, try to suck in a little bit of air because that helps to open it up even more. Once you have the wine in your mouth sort of swirl it around. You have taste buds all over your tongue and with that, we tend to taste sweetness on the tip of our tongue, the streicity on the sides and the dryness or what is called tannen on the top of our tongue. So you want to get it all around in your mouth and really fill up your mouth with the wine. Sometimes people even talk about chewing wine where you know you really feel a mouth fill that allows you to determine the body of the wine. It doesn’t always look graceful but it does help you to really get the wine all over your tongue. Some people talk about legs when you’re looking at wine and that’s just once you swirled it, what comes down the edges they can be fat, they can be thin, fall quickly or fall slowly. What that tells you is the alcohol level of wine, the fatter sometimes the less alcohol but when I want to know about the alcohol in the wine, I just look on the label. So legs don’t really tell you that much and when people tend to talk about them it is just for show. That is pretty how much you taste wine. Look at the color, smell it and taste it."