Want to start exploring the big, wonderful world of wines? This article has you covered. From getting started to finding wine deals online, these simple guidelines help you begin your journey to understanding wine.
Wine Tasting: Getting Started
Learning to taste wine is like learning to appreciate music or art, and the pleasure you receive is proportionate to the effort you put in. The more fine-tuning you give your sensory abilities, the better you’ll pick up and enjoy the nuances that great wines feature. Learning to recognize these details is called palate training.
Being able to sniff out and make sense of the subtleties of complex wine aromas is important for tasting. If you were to hold your nose while swallowing a mouthful of wine, you’d find that the flavor was very muted. This is because your nose is key to your palate or sense of taste. When you learn to smell the wine well, you’ll start to develop the skill of isolating flavors. You’ll be able to sense the way they unfold and interact. And, to some extent, you’ll be able to assign a language to these details to describe them.
This is how wine professionals — those who make, buy, sell, and write about wine — make part of their living.
With something so subjective as taste, there’s hardly any right or wrong way to do it, but some rules do apply.
First of all, you need to be focused and methodical in your approach. You can’t rush through something and expect to get a lot out of it. Conversely, you can become somewhat of an expert incredibly quickly just by paying attention and having patience.
Recognizing a Good Wine
You may have heard from either friends or experts that any wine you enjoy is a “good wine.” If enjoying wine is your goal, then this might as well be true. And it is important to figure out what you like personally. However, quickly passing judgment on whether a wine meets your specific tastes or not is a far cry from properly evaluating it.
If you’re tasting a wine correctly, you’ll be able to identify its main flavor, as well as its various scent components. You will also quickly grasp the basic characteristics featured by all of the most important varietal grapes, and the blended wines from the world’s different regions. You will also learn to notice and point out specific flaws in poor-quality wines.
This may sound daunting, but never fear. With focus and patience, it will take far less time to master than you would think.
Finding Flaws in Wines
As much as any wine aficionado would like to believe otherwise, there are some legitimately bad wines out there. Even more disappointing is that they’re not necessarily the cheap ones. As a result of bad winemaking, poor storage, or bad corks, some wines simply go bad by the time they reach your table.
If you’re ordering a bottle of wine in a restaurant, you want to be sure it tastes the way it was meant to. Your servers aren’t likely to be experts when it comes to a wine’s quality, and they aren’t testing every wine or paying attention. This means that you’re the final authority on deciding whether a restaurant wine is good or not.
This is when it comes in handy to be capable of sniffing out common faults in wines. Having confidence in your wine tasting abilities will make it easier for you to send a wine back when it doesn’t live up to its potential.
Buying Wine
A staggering 71% of online shoppers believe they can find better deals online than they can in stores, and that’s often true when it comes to online wine sellers. While getting a bargain probably shouldn’t be the first thing on your mind if you’re serious about learning wine, wine deals online and cheap wine online shopping make it a little easier to keep your new hobby within budget.
Buying wines has never been easier than it is today. Finding wine deals online allows you to find wines from around the world at a reasonable price. Between these wine deals online and the information in this article, you should be well prepared to enter the world of wine tasing with confidence.