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Wine Tasting 101

Judging wines is not as easy as it looks Snorting is allowed, slurping is acceptable, and spitting is encouraged in the classy art of wine tasting I wore a dark shirt and dark pants to the seminar.

Judging wines is not as easy as it looks

Snorting is allowed, slurping is acceptable, and spitting is encouraged in the classy art of wine tasting

I wore a dark shirt and dark pants to the seminar. It was my understanding that wine swirling was part of the course, and I wanted to walk out of that room without any visible stains.

It turned out that the swirling was elementary… a mere flick of the wrist and a quarter pivot counter-clockwise. My real concern turned out to be drool.

I confess to my shame, that the subtle differences between an $8 and an $80 bottle of wine are completely lost on me. I’m no connoisseur, but since I find myself buying more wine as I get older, it was high time to learn some of the fundamentals. Like beets, wine appreciation is an acquired taste. A little education doesn’t hurt either.

"When we talk about wine, it’s important to use the right words," says Mark Davidson, a sommelier for the award-winning Beach Side Café and the instructor of a seminar called Grape Beginnings: An Introduction to Wine Tasting, which was held as part of this year’s Cornucopia celebration. He also teaches Basic Certificate and Higher Certificate Wine & Spirit Education Trust Programs at the Dubrulle International Culinary and Hotel Institute of Canada, and helped found the Vancouver Wine Academy.

"There is a vocabulary to wine tasting that you learn over time that helps you to describe the little differences between wines. When someone asks you if you like the wine you’re drinking, you can say yes or no. But when someone asks you why you liked it, or why one wine you tried is better than another, it gets a little more difficult to qualify."

We use three, maybe four senses, in the wine appraisal process; sight, smell, taste and sometimes touch – some palates are so advanced that the wine drinker can actually get a tactile sensation from the wine.

For any of these senses to have meaning, however, you have to understand a little about how wine is made. For example, wine that is aged longer or in warmer climates may appear darker in colour than new wines or wines that are produced in cold climates. This is important because wines that are darker because they were aged tend to be richer in taste, while wines that are dark because they were produced in a warm climate tend to be sweeter and fruitier because the fruit itself is usually sweeter and fruitier.

If it sounds complicated, that’s because it is – some people spend a lifetime acquiring the skills necessary to become a wine connoisseur. That’s also why every classy restaurant worth its stars has a sommelier (wine expert) on the payroll: when you have wine on the menu for $300, and a customer asks why they should shell out, an "I don’t know" is not going to close the deal.

There are over 3,000 different "vitus vineferas" or varieties of grapes suitable for wine production, and vineyards can be found in every temperate region around the world. Although the classic varietals are almost name brands in themselves, such as Riesling, Merlot, Pinot Noir, and Cabernet Sauvignon, the sommelier has to know his stuff before he can make a recommendation.

Once you have a thorough knowledge of how grapes are grown, picked, and processed, you will be able to attribute sight, smell and taste characteristics of a wine back to its production.

Although a winery’s quality standards and production methods will have a huge effect on the wine, there are dozens of factors, including weather and season length, that are out of the winemaker’s hands. For that reason, there are also better years for some regions than others.

"Wines are like children," says Davidson. "Everything that gets done to it until its adulthood will show up in the psychiatric report."

That said, with a rudimentary understanding of wine making, the class was ready to start the tasting process. Each participant was given six glasses of wine, three white and three red, to swirl, sniff and gurgle.

When appraising wine, the first thing you take into consideration is its appearance – clarity, intensity and colour. Some wines are crystal clear, while others are more opaque due to the quality of the fruit and the methods used to ferment and age the wine. If the wine was aged in oak barrels, for example, it tends to become opaque over time and inherit a slightly woody taste.

Intensity and colour go hand in hand – colour is the colour and intensity is the overall brightness of the colour. One dark red may give off a red glow, while another appears to be flat due to the particulate floating in the glass. The glowing wine has probably been filtered more, and will taste cleaner.

Once you have appraised a wine’s appearance, it’s time to use your nose. Try sticking your nose into a glass of wine and taking a couple of sniffs. Then swirl the glass around a little to agitate the wine and sniff again.

"By shaking it up, you mix the wine with the air in the glass, and you get a really good whiff of the wine," says Davidson. As your nose develops, you will be able to pick out characteristics that suggest different fermentation methods and blends. Some white wines can smell like flowers, apples or pears, while some red wines can smell like oak wood, cinnamon, spices, or berries.

Once you have appraised the aroma, it’s time to put the wine is your mouth. You start off with a small sip, hold it in your mouth, and slurp air through it.

This is about the time I discovered the drooling problem – if you slurp too hard, you’ll get the wine lodged in your windpipe and choke; if you don’t slurp hard enough, you drool onto your shirt. This has the same effect as the swirl, mixing the wine with air to release the aromas and activate your taste buds.

Once you’ve slurped, swish the wine around in your mouth a few times to get a sense of the taste on your salty, sweet, sour, and bitter taste buds.

Then it’s time to spit. You could swallow, but at the average wine tasting a sommelier will taste up to 30 different wines. "If I didn’t spit, I’d be falling out of my chair by the time I got to the fifth glass. Wine tasting is supposed to be a classy thing, and there you are, snorting, slurping and spitting, but that’s how it works. We all spit. I try to dress well to compensate."

Spitting also leads to drooling, so get used to spitting into the bucket with some velocity. "Put some wind into it," suggests Davidson.

Taste can mean any number of things, and is the most subjective of our senses. When experts get together, however, they can often agree which of the wines they tasted is the best and which is the worst based on their experience. Great wines taste great, even if they aren’t your personal preference.

Some wines are sweet, some are sour and some are bitter because they are high in tannin (a bitter compound found in grape skins and seeds). Sometimes the taste is accidental, sometimes it’s coincidental, but generally it’s completely intentional – a dessert wine, for example, is expected to be sweet. Each wine has a distinct character that the vintner has worked long and hard to achieve.

There are two other factors that can be determined by tasting – alcohol content and length.

If your mouth starts to burn while you’re slurping and swishing, more than it does with another wine you’ve slurped and swished, it probably has a higher alcohol content.

Length refers to aftertaste, which is often considered to be a good thing. A wine without aftertaste is considered to be "dry". Some sommeliers actually look at their watch after spitting to determine how many seconds this aftertaste lasts. Aftertaste is usually a good indicator of the richness of a wine, and the balance achieved between all the other factors.

The white wines we tasted were a 1997 Sumac Ridge Sauvignon Blanc, a 1998 Hawthorne Mountain Gewurtztraminer, and a 1998 Riva Ranch Wente Chardonnay. The reds were a Blue Mountain Pinot Noir, a Burrowing Owl Merlot, and a Ravenswood Zinfandel, all from 1998.

The Merlot and the Wente Chardonnay were so good that I couldn’t bring myself to spit them out, and the Zinfandel had a kick like a mule.

After the hour and a half introduction to wine tasting, I left the seminar a little bolder and a little wiser. Then I took a nap.



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