Color in Wine Tasting

Video Transcript

"After you check a wine's clarity, if everything seems good, the next step of wine tasting is to look at the wine's color. Wine is available in a wide variety of colors; from very light yellow to yellow gold, to maybe even a little bit of green, to pink, to salmon, to rose, to ruby red, to garnet red, and even dark purple, black, and inky. All of these colors are rather indicative of the different type of wine, but whatever the color is, your step is to look at the color, and try to give it a name. That's the most important part; to try to give it a name. You can stick with a simple thing like yellow gold, or you can get kind of crazy; like old guacamole over straw, or poured through burnt coffee. There are two ways to look at a wine's color. What you want to do is take the glass of wine, and put it on a standard white background. Then you can lean over and look straight down into it. I think this wine has a nice kind of ruby glow. There's another way to do it, too, and that way is to lean the glass of wine over, and again; look through the wine onto a white background, look for the deepest part of the wine; which is called the eye or the robe, and that's a very good way to ascertain color. Again, I think this wine is a nice, beautiful ruby red. If you say that to your friend, I think this wine is a nice ruby red, and your friend says, I think so, too, you have started the entire conversation about a wine's color. After you look at a wine's color, and give it a name, that's kind of what we're talking about when we say the wine's hue. After that, you want to talk about color intensity. Color intensity can mean very light to very dark, and we talk about color intensity on a scale of one to ten. One is a glass of wine that looks like a glass of water with one little drop of ink. A ten on the color intensity scale will look like the bottle of ink itself. I bet you find that if you try to share with your friends what the number of color intensity you think the wine is, you'll pretty much agree. I've found that people usually agree, and that's a nice place to start talking about wine. So you talk about a wine's color, it's hue, and its intensity, look at it straight down through the glass, turn it on its side, look for the eye or the robe of the glass, and that's the perfect way to look at a wine's color."