Steps of Wine Tasting

"I'm going to tell you about the steps of wine tasting. People love to go wine tasting, and we talk about wine tasting all the time. Tasting actually has a few steps. The first thing in tasting a wine is you want to look at it. You look at it for many different things. You look at it for clarity, you look at the color, you look at the color intensity, and you can swirl the wine in the glass and watch the way it drips down the side. All of that is just the step of looking at a wine; in other words, the sense of sight. The second thing you want to do is swirl the wine, and then smell it. Smelling is the most important part of wine tasting, because there are over six hundred different aromas that have been identified in wine, so you can spend most of your time smelling. I used to give a class called wine smelling; no one ever came though. The next step is to taste it. Take a little bit of wine in your mouth; about a teaspoon full, maybe a teaspoon and a half. Make sure you move it all around your mouth. While the wine is in your mouth, draw a little bit of air in, swallow, and then exhale. You might find this a little bit embarrassing, but it's what you have to do. Let me demonstrate. After you taste the wine, you draw your attention to the wine's aftertaste, or those impressions on your palate that exist after you swallow and exhale; that's the finish. The last thing you want to do is sit back and notice your overall impressions of the wine. Try to put those into words, and you'll have done the perfect sequence of wine tasting."