There’s no right way or wrong way to taste wine. It’s this simple — do you like what you’re drinking or not?
That being said, there’s a formal way to taste wine that reveals more about the wine in your glass, even before you start drinking. This is a method which is largely used by wine tasters and it is very simple. It involves 5 simple steps and it is practiced by sommeliers to refine their palates and sharpen their ability to recall wines. Even though this technique is used by pros, it’s actually quite simple to understand and can help anyone to improve their wine palate.
We are going to break it down for you, leaving you feeling comfortable and confident if you wish to use this method : The five S method.
The five S method stands for
- See
- Swirl
- Smell
- Sip
- Savor.
Let’s explain what each one means.
SEE
The first step in tasting a wine happens before you actually taste the wine. When the wine is first poured into your glass — before swirling it, smelling it, or sipping it — just look at it (See).
Color
The reason you look at the wine is to get a sense of its color. The color can tell you a lot about the wine you’ll be drinking. When doing this, many people like to hold their glass of wine against a white background, as that helps you see the hue of the color more easily.
A wine’s color can tell you a lot about the wine you’ll be drinking.
So why do we care about color?
The first thing to remember is that the color of a wine comes from contact with the grape skins after the grapes have been juiced. The longer the wine comes in contact with those skins, the more those skins will impart their color on the wine.
The grape skins have a lot of their own characteristics, just like the zest of an orange or an apple skin. In fact, the longer the skin of a grape is in contact with the wine, the more of its own characteristics it imparts. On top of this, oak can also help make colors lighter or darker.
The wine’s hue is itself an invitation to the sipper. Color creates expectations (subconsciously and otherwise) in the taster’s mind. Entire kaleidoscopes of colors exist, far beyond just red and yellow:
- For red wines: purple (or violet), ruby, garnet (or brick red), tawny, brown (or mahogany).
- For white wines: green (or yellow-green), lemon, gold, amber (or copper), brown.
- For rosé wines: pink (or onion skin), salmon, orange.
There are three main factors which affect a wine’s color: age, grape variety and the winemaking techniques employed.
Intensity of color
Color intensity indicates how much you can see through the liquid. The greater the intensity, the more opaque the color. To determine the correct hue and intensity of a wine, you have to tilt the glass at 45 degrees in front of a white surface. Check the meniscus – the oval shape that the liquid forms when the glass is turned on its side. You can gauge intensity by assessing how much the color extends from the core of the meniscus to the rim. If at the rim there is little color, then the wine is said to be weak (or pale). On the other hand, if the pigments reach almost the border of the meniscus, the wine has a deep intensity. A medium intensity is somewhere in between.
Clarity
A healthy wine is usually clear and transparent. There is no sign of sediment in the glass. Conversely, if some suspended matter is visible and you can’t see clearly through the liquid, the wine is said to be hazy (or cloudy.)
Haziness in wine can either be a sign of a fault or a deliberate decision by the winemaker. Some wines (for example most natural wines) are not filtered and therefore their appearance is hazy even though they are perfectly sound (and sometimes delicious!).
Fizziness
For sparkling wine, one factor to consider is perlage (the bubbles).
Generally speaking, the finer the bubbles, the higher the quality of sparkling wine. Great Champagne are famous for their fine perlage. Fine bubbles mean that the fermentation occurred slowly, giving the wine greater balance and a better integration of flavors. Another quality criteria is the persistence of the bubbles. A never-ending flow of frothy bubbles is commonly regarded as an indication of high quality. If the bubbles stop emerging after just a few seconds, that is perceived as the mark of an inferior sparkling wine.
But when non-sparkling wines are described as fizzy or spritzy, those are generally negative terms, and many consider it a flaw.
There are two main reasons for a wine to have unpleasant fizz: either some carbon dioxide was trapped inside when the wine was bottled, or the wine started to re-ferment in the bottle.
Sometimes you’ll see a wine described as having a hint of fizz, or a slight fizz, and that’s most often the negative connotation.
Now that you understand the appearance of the wine, it’s time to swirl it around your glass and smell it.
Stay tuned for part TWO …
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