Clarity in Wine Tasting

Video Transcript

"One of the first steps that you should do when you're tasting wine is look at the wine, and the first step of looking at a wine should be looking at a wine for clarity. Clarity is the ability of a wine to absorb and reflect light, and no matter what your color or style of wine, it should have some clarity. A sparkling wine should be crystal clear; as a matter of fact, we call this daylight or sunlight clear. If you look down into it you'll see the bubbles, but you'll also see the wine just glowing from within. It is easy to see clarity in white wine; you can see through it. Then see through, and also; it should be shining like a diamond. It is a little bit more difficult to notice clarity in red wine. Red wine is not always see through; as a matter of fact, red wine can be on a continuum from rather light and see through, to very dark, opaque and inky. This is not a reflection of the color, but it's a reflection of the wine's ability to reflect the light. If a wine is dark and red and inky, look down into it with a white background, and somewhere in there you should see a shine. It doesn't matter the color of the wine, but you should see a nice inner glow; a little bit as if there were a star or a diamond in the wine. Another way to look at clarity is to make sure that there's no cloudiness or film on the wine; if so, that might tell us that something has gone a little bit wrong with the wine. The first step of looking at a wine is to look for that clarity, that inner glow. If you do not see clarity, or if you do see a film or a cloudiness, you probably want to step back and investigate that wine a little further, because that's one of the first signs that a wine has maybe gone bad or oxidized. If there's no cloudiness or film; you see that nice crystal clarity, all is well, and it's time to move on to the next step of wine tasting."