Learn How to Drink Wine like an Expert – How to Drink Wine Properly
You might wonder what all the fuss is about learning how to drink wine like an expert, or how to drink wine properly, but the truth is that there is a way of enjoying wine that rewards you with a good wine’s best characteristics of taste, aroma, and complexity. Whether you prefer a delicious red wine, such as a Cabernet Sauvignon or a buttery white wine, like a Chardonnay, or any wine in between, you’ll get the most out of your bottle of wine by learning some simple steps to “uncorking” a full wine-tasting experience by using your senses of sight, taste, and smell. Call it learning how to drink wine properly, or call it enjoying the wine properly, there’s a certain way that it’s done.
How to Drink Wine – the Basic Steps Think of wine tasting as an adventure in, well wine tasting, one that will deepen your appreciation of wines. We’ll start with the basic senses in the order of seeing (looking), smell, and taste, and you easily catch on to expand your wine experience, finding new ways to describe what your senses are identifying. You’ll soon know how to drink wine like an expert, properly, and all that! How to Drink Wine Step 1 – Look at Color and Clarity (Opaqueness) For this first step it’s beneficial to hold up behind the wine glass a white piece of paper, a white linen napkin, or something that creates a white neutral background. Pour a glass of a favorite wine, either red or white, into an appropriate wine glass. Then examine the wine, by tilting the glass away from you so that you can observe the wine’s color starting at the rim of the glance and following the wine to the center of the glass. Looking at the color, search beyond your basic blush, red, or white to find a closer description of the wine. In a red wine you might see shades of ruby, purple, magenta, garnet, red brick or brown, just to mention a few colors. In a light wine you might find that you’d describe the color as golden, light yellow, clear with no particular color, straw-like with shades of green, or amber.
After looking for color, observe the wine for its opaque characteristics; for example, is the wine heavy, dark, watery, translucent? How else could you describe it? Is it clear or cloudy, or does it have sediment floating in it, like pieces of cork? Aged red wines tend to have a tinge of orange at the edge of its color in comparison with a younger red of the same varietal; White wines typically don’t age well, but an older white wine is generally darker than a younger wine of the same varietal. How to Drink Wine Step 2 – Smell Next, release the aroma of your wine by swishing it around for a good 10 to 12 seconds, and then sniff it to get a first impression of the wine. After that first impression settles, press your nose down into the wine glass and inhale deeply through your nose. What are your impressions of the aroma now? The smell of berries, oak, flowers, citrus and vanilla are common descriptions. Can you add anything to that list? Humans can pick up on thousands of unique scents, but our taste perception is confined to sweet, sour salty, and bitter. The combination of taste and smell is what allows us to discern flavor. Our sense of smell is key to properly analyzing a wine.
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