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Attrezzi?s Wine
Essentials And
The Art of Wine Tasting
?or the Science of tasting ?or why can?t the snobs treat it like the beverage that it is ?or I really like beer because it?s just so darn simple
You decide!
Rule #1 ? Wine is made for YOU to enjoy, and don?t ever let anyone tell you otherwise. If YOU like it, it is good. Even if it?s White Zinfandel?
Wine has peasant roots, it basically took the place of non potable water for workers in the field. It was cheap, preserveable (due to it?s alcoholic content) and went great with food. Plus, and this is my brief interjection, it gave a nice warm happy feeling to boost morale. No different than today, really if you think about it, except our ?field work? now takes place at Christmas-time office parties and after work business meetings.
So the ultimate question here is why do we ?taste? wine, and make funny faces and play with our glass like a child with a top. Well the answer is quite simple, we taste so we can communicate ? especially to others. If we walk into a wine shop and say ? ?give me wine I like? well, we can?t. For contrast when we walk into a car dealership we don?t say ??give me a car I like? we say ?I want a 6-cylinder 4 wheel drive model with 16 vanity mirrors, a hemi, and a moon roof?. In other words, to know wine, you need to understand and recognize the components involved so you can express your tastes to others.
Or to return to rule #1, you don?t need to do any of this; you can merely drink everything in sight and smile. You decide?
Tasting Wine.
Tasting wine, of course begins with Looking at it. Make sense? Of course not. Which brings me to rule #2.
Rule #2 ? Wine does not often make sense, and opinions are like fingertips ? nearly everyone has at least one.
In other words, don?t ever think you are wrong or feel intimidated by wine. Just this week I had a sip of a 1996 Mouton Rothschild Puillac from 1996 ($300+ a bottle ought to put it into non wine snob perspective). Was it good? Most definitely, quite literally amazing. Was it worth $300 of my hard earned money? No way. Not a chance. I?d much rather have 30 great $10 bottles. Wine is what you make of it. But back to the art of the taste.
So you?re sitting in a restaurant and you are faced with the uncomfortable moment of choosing a wine from the list. It is forever a stressor to the wine newbie.
Three rules:
- If you can afford it, always order by the bottle and not by the glass (wines sit open on bar shelves for who knows how long and essentially die from exposure to oxygen)
- It is a secret rule that people buy wines from restaurants primarily on Price points (costs). As a rule, the most popular wines on the list are the second cheapest ? mostly because consumers never want to feel like they are picking the cheapest wine there is, so they move a few dollars up. Restaurateurs know this and position the wines they make the most profit from in this category. Not to say they aren?t decent wines, but that?s a rule of thumb to remember. If you can stretch into the higher brackets you will generally get a better bang for your buck, markups are often lower on higher end wines and a better value overall.
- Wines taste better in restaurants. It?s the experience, the ambience. If we really knew our $24 bottle cost the restaurant $7 it wouldn?t taste so good? or would it? Here?s where learning about wine can be a detriment. That?s why it never tastes ?the same? when you buy it in a state liquor store. (Disclaimer: All Attrezzi wines taste better at home than from any restaurant or other liquor store. Why? because we supply the best wine service of course!)
But we must make our way onto:
The tasting process.
The tasting process can be broken down into a few core parts.
Appearance
Nose
Taste (Palate)
And we begin with Appearance. A clean crystal glass in good lighting is the best vessel to judge appearances. This of course proves entirely irrelevant to the actual taste of the wine, but can give some clues as to what you are about to drink. For example, if your $35 bottle of wine on your dinner table is the color of wet mud, it probably has gone bad.
The components that make up the appearance of wine are broken down into:
Color
Clarity
Intensity
Rim versus Core
Color is observed by looking at a glass of wine in a neutral setting (generally over a white piece of paper under good lighting) Colors reveal a good deal.
Some color tidbits to remember, and these are generalities not rules:
For WHITE wines:
The clearer a white wine is in color, the younger it probably is. White wines darken as they age. Age generally occurs in oak barrels so a ?golden? wine has likely spent time in oak ? and will have oakiness on the palate. Think of the contrast between a crisp Pinto Grigio versus a California Chard. Clear wines can reveal a lot of character, so don?t be fooled just because they look like water.
Greenish tints often indicate freshness.
Prickles? or bubbles (like carbonation) can occur in some wines naturally (a good thing) or in some unnaturally (a bad thing). It helps to know what you are drinking in this case.
For RED wines.
Most young red wines are in fact purple. Bright purpley-purple. In fact, if a wine is extremely young and has had no exposure to oxygen (very proper grape handling in modern age) it will have a bluish tinge on the rim. This blue is actually a compound from the skin that disappears with exposure to Oxygen. This is a sign of a well made young wine.
As a red wine ages it changes in color, you can often judge a wine?s age by its color alone. Red wines (the opposite of whites) lighten with age.
Purple > Ruby Red > Red > Maroon > Mahogany > Orange > Brown
With modern technologies most wines we consume today have not seen a lot of age and fall on the left side of the spectrum.
Clarity
Clarity can tell you a couple of things. Some wine is unfiltered and will be ?hazy.? Provided you know in advance the wine was its unfiltered, this is a bonus as some of the yeast and other compounds may remain to add flavor. Europeans filter less than Americans. I (think) I have yet to have an unfiltered Australian wine. Haziness that exists on a filtered wine generally indicates a bad wine. But you never know until you try it...
Intensity
This one?s a no brainer. A wine with a deep intensity in color generally is more concentrated and richer on the palate. Wines that look watery may actually be watery, but grapes do make a difference. Pinot Noir is lighter in color than a Shiraz, but not always lighter in flavor. But if your California Cab looks like a Rose ? you?ve got problems.
Rim versus Core.
Hopefully I am someday with you to demonstrate? This pertains only to red wines (as a rule) but colors often differ in the rim of a red wine, especially as it ages. Pinot Noir often has a unique rim appearance. To observe this phenomenon, tip your glass at a rather extreme angle (being careful not to dump it's precisious contents) over a well lit piece of bright white paper. You will notice that the color of a wine changes as it nears the rim of the glass and is essentially 'thinner.' This is a great trick in dtermining age and quality of wine. Young wines that have been protected from oxygen will have a bluish tinge on the rim, old grand wines from france will have a nice orang-ey brown rim to signify thier age (remembering that older wines tirn lesser red in color). In other words, if your Grand Cru from 1973 is purple, you've got a problem!
The aroma of wine, aka the ?Nose?
Now that color is behind us we get to the fun part ? the sniffing of the wine. The part that no good mannered person likes to do in public. Well go ahead and do it ? it?s fun, and it adds to the experience. It also reveals most of the wines character (and flaws) before it hits your palate. 80% of taste is actually smell, and you continue to smell a wine once it?s in your mouth.
Smell is a huge component to taste. Take a sip of wine with your nose plugged sometime and see. Therefore it is simple logic that smelling wine can reveal its taste.
How to ?Nose? wine.
Use a glass which tapers toward the top. Don?t be shy, put your nose right into the glass and take a series of short deep sniffs. What do you smell?
Generally, newbie noses smell a fruit or a berry. As time goes on and you develop a personal ?smell palate? you can eventually pull out individual smell compounds like cedar or mint. A lot ofthese fancy smell analogies are wine snob intelligence demonstrations, but you really can tell a lot about wine by it's aromas, and these smells are truly there if you think creatively. Don't knock 'horse' 'leather' and 'passionfruit' until you've smelled them. I have. And it all 'clicks' once you have. But don't fret, it takes years to develp this mental 'palette' of aromas. Your mind and sense of smell must be trained.
Swirl the wine
So why swish the wine? Ahhh, to see if it has legs of course, no? No. Legs have more to do with the alcohol content and the condition of the glass than anythig we care about. We swirl wine in the glass because it aerates the wine, releasing volatile odor compounds that weren?t there when smelled on its own. The simplest way to learn the art of the swirl is to keep the base of the glass on a flat surface like a table. Cup your hand over your nose and the glass for an even more intense effect.
What do the smells mean?
On the most simplistic level, the smells are primarily there to judge the quality of the wine and determine if the wine reflects the grape and or style. Above all the smelling of wine is there to ascertain if there are wine ?flaws? or nasty things that can ruin a wine. Bacteria, improper storage, and exposure to oxygen can all destroy a wine and each has a unique odor that experts can recognize.
Corked Wine
I?m a snob. I love wine corks. Someday we will open $200 bottles with a majestic screw top (Oh God I hope not) But it is true. Estimates vary but up to 20% of all wines are potentially ?corked? or tainted with a chemical substance that exists in cork (the bark of a Portuguese tree) If I told you 20% of all of your future meat purchases would be rotten what would you do? This is why we may see corks disappear. But die hards like me just enjoy the feeling of the pop.
Corked wine is recognized on the nose by a scent similar to wet cardboard, slightly moldy and just plain ?off?. If you come across a wine with this smell or taste ? return it. It?s expected.
Make up the scents you experience.
So can people really smell diesel? Barnyard? Leather? Or are they just making that up? Fact is, yes, those smells are common. As are vanilla, cherry, and bell pepper. All these words actually do is create a means for people to communicate characteristics of wine. Simple as that. What I like, you may not ? so saying ?it?s good? is irrelevant. Even when it comes to wine types ?I love Cabernet? don?t work because there are so many different styles and unique winemakers out there. One Mans Cab is another?s Merlot?
For starters, just take note of the smells you like or dislike and begin to assemble a mental picture of what you like. The rest will follow.
Finally, the Taste!
Sweetness (amount of residual sugar)
Acidity
Tannin
Body
Intensity
Fruitiness and Flavor
Alcohol
Finish
OK, I know you?re all worn out by now but the time is finally here ? take a sip and tell me what you think!!!!
OK, that first sip --- forget about it, it wasn?t a true representation of the wine. The harsh acidity of wine ?shocks? the palate on your first taste. Never judge a wine until after you?ve had the first sip.
Take a second sip ? viola. You have tasted the wine.
Now for the slurping and swooshing
When most of us drink we pour and swallow, correct. So why slurp wines? Fact is our mouths contain a number of receptive areas that taste differently. Sweetness is on the tip of the tongue, acidity on the sides, etc. So the best way to truly appreciate the complex flavors of the wine is to distribute the juice to every part of your mouth. By just sipping and swallowing you are missing a large part of the experience.
The best way to taste is to take a sip of wine, pull it toward the back of your mouth, then switch it into both cheeks (the acidity will be felt at this point) push the wine through your teeth (without spitting it on your neighbor) and finally swallowing (or spitting it out if you?re trying to stay sober). Too much work you say? Yes, it is, but you only need to do this the first couple of times to really understand the complexities of a wine. From then on you can sip and enjoy as you please.
Sweetness
Swetness refers to the amount of residual sugar left in the wine ? generally at the whim of the winemaker. Wines that are totally dry (no residual sugar) leave the mouth and throat, well, dry. Most wines have a small percentage of sugar in them ? but do not taste sweet at all. This hint of sugar adds depth to the wine and goes mostly unnoticed. Finally sweetness extends to the other side where it can be sickly sweet and ?sticky?.
Acidity
Acidity is a cruicial component of wine. If you?ve ever had a ?watery? wine, or one that lacked ?zing? it was low on acid. Overripe grapes are low in acid and certain wineries (known to be done in California) literally sprinkle various forms of acid into the wine to bring it back to life. Overly acidic wines (usually the cheap ones) actually burn the throat and are too harsh to enjoy. A balanced wine is the key, a perfect blend of sugar, acid, and alcohol.
Tannin
Tannins are a hot spot for many wine newbies. Tannins are components that dry the mouth ? a great example of tannin is observed in a cup of over steeped tea. Many people are turned off by tannic wines. Cabernet Sauvignon, Bordeux, and many other French and Italian wines are often high in tannin. Tannin itself comes from skins, seeds, and vegetation in grapes and are saught after by some winemakers. Tannins serve as preservatives that allow wine to age. This is why some wines need to cellar, so the tannins will soften and make the wine more drinkable.
Body
The body of a wine generally refers to the richness of the mouthfeel, generally described in terms of light, medium, or full bodied. Using milk an example (and forgetting entirely about taste) think of Skim (light) Whole mile (medium) and Eggnog (full). Few wines will ever be as full bodied as eggnog (I hope) but you get the idea. Pinot Noirs are often light bodied and Cabernets are on the full side.
Intensity is an important component of wine, especially to me. I like my wine to scream out its presence to me in one form or another. A dull wine just doesn?t turn me on.
Fruitiness Some wines have it ? some don?t. Its pretty dependant on style. A number of French wines are low on fruit while most Californians scream out fruit flavors. It?s your choice, but learn to note the differences.
Alcohol also plays a big part of wine. Not just for it?s effects on consumers but on the overall presentation of the wine. Alcohol adds body and richness, but too much can make a wine seem harsh. Again we?re looking for a balance of all of the above components.
And finally, the finish
Top quality wines leave a long lingering flavor in your mouth. As a rule, the best wines have long pleasant finishes, a finish being nothing more than (delicious) lingering flavors that won?t leave the mouth after a sip. No one wants a long flavor of fresh cigarette butts (well except die hard smokers I guess). Cheap wines often have lots of fruit up front then immediately disappear never to be seen again.
For reference: Flavor and Aroma of Wine as written in Karen MacNeils Wine Bible (a must-have wine reference guide:
Whites:
Fruits: Fresh ? Apple, apricot, banana, coconut, fig, grapefruit, lemon, lime, litchi, melon, dried orange peel, peach, pear, pineapple, cooked ? baked apple, baked pear
Butter and Cream: Butter, butterscotch, caramel, cream, custard
Vegetables: Asparagus, bell pepper, green beans, olives
Grains and Nuts: Almond, biscuit, bread dough, brioche, hazelnut, roasted nut, yeast
Spices: Cinnamon, cloves, ginger, white pepper
Flowers: Gardenia, geranium, honeysuckle, rose
Earth: Chalk, flint, grass, hay, minerals, stone, straw
Barrel Aromas and Flavors: Oak, toast, vanilla
Other aromas and flavors: honey, gasoline, rubber boot
Reds:
Fruits: Fresh ? blackberry, blackcurrant, blueberry, boysenberry, cherry, cranberry, dried orange peel, plum, pomegranate, raspberry, strawberry , cooked ? baked blackberry, baked cherry, baked raspberry, jam, prunes
Chocolate and Coffee: Bitter chocolate, cocoa, milk chocolate, mocha, coffee, espresso
Vegetables: Asparagus, bell pepper, green beans, mushrooms, olives, truffles
Herbs and Spices: Black pepper, cinnamon, cloves, licorice, mint, spiced tea
Tobacco: Cigar box, pipe tobacco, smoke
Flowers: Geranium, rose, violet
Earth: Cedar, damp earth, dried leaves, eucalyptus, forest floor, gravel, pine, stone
Animal: barnyard, horse blanket, manure, sweat
Barrel Aromas and Flavors: Oak, toast, vanilla
Other aromas and flavors: cola, game, leather, tar, tea, worn boot
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