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Wine: The Tasting Experience? Continued...
5) The Wine Taster's Ritual. So, how do we appreciate thousands of years of history, families that wish for good growing seasons, trees cut down in France, and flashy consultants in Savile Row suits? Simple, we start the mysterious ritual by staring at the wine in the glass. Sight. Looking at the wine before "sticking your nose" in the glass and "chewing" on the liquid will give you a couple of clues as to what to expect as your reach these stages. ...Maneuver the glass under the light, stare down the center of the bowl... Check the intensity and clarity of the color. The color of wine will change and develop over time. For example, the author of this article touted bleach, blonde hair as a child. By the time he passed puberty his hair darkened to a dirty blonde. Similarly white wine becomes deeper, more golden with age. If the author was born with brown hair, even black, by the time he baby boomed, instead of losing his hair, it is possible that he could age elegantly with a crop of silver gray hair. So, red wines will start with a deep rich color, perhaps purple, but as it ages it will lighten around the edges becoming more brown, even orange or rusty at the rim. ...The wine has been aging for 24 months. Still very young... The density runs all the way through. A young wine will be more fruit-forward. Think of a Cezanne still life and the thick, rich colors he used in painting his pictures, the fruit almost appeared one-dimensional. As wine and paint age gracefully, the colors will fade and become more savory even spicy - think salt and pepper hair. Smell. ...Stem pinched between pointer and thumb, swirls the wine and sticks her nose deep into the glass. Smelling is scary, especially when you are not familiar with swirling and fear splashing yourself. But swirling is important. Don't expect to swirl effectively when your glass is full, that is foolish. Wine should be poured to fill one-third of the glass - wine drinkers don't top off glasses like most of our waiters and bartenders do. When you swirl wine in the glass, you begin to release the aromas. Think of the ocean. When the waters are calm, it presents a consistent color of itself. But when the wind is blowing and the tide is rising and the waves come rolling in, the waters will project a variety of blues and greens for your visual pleasure. Similarly, wine aromas need to be able to present themselves, so we create our own movement by swirling. ...Fruit-forward. Mountain berries. Currants. Cassis. A little leather and tar. Consistent with the color. We just learned that a visual connection with color would notify our noses that a bowl of fruit is present, but mountain berries? Recognizing an aroma in a glass of wine could be as difficult as finishing an entire bottle of wine in one sip. So, this is where we cheat. Ann Noble, professor of Viticulture and Enology at the University of California, Davis, created the simplest crib notes on the subject of appreciating the scents of wine. Professor Noble produced the "Aroma Wheel... to help us enhance our ability to discriminate and remember wine flavors." The rainbow colored wheel starts on the macro level with the whole bowl of fruit and removes each piece until she even describes the clay or steel that constitutes the bowl itself. The suggestion is to associate each scent with an accompanying varietal (or grape). If we remember that the Cabernet Sauvignon grape has "black" berry aromas we can shout out "currants" when we lift our head from the glass and nobody will question your sense of smell. Slip the term "mountain berries" into the description and you actually may receive the oohs and ahhs of those who didn't pay the ten bucks for Professor Noble's overnight delivery fees. As for other grape characteristics, Pinot Noir tends to have the perfume of cherries and strawberries and Merlot is plumy. So, next time you buy a bottle of wine, stop at your grocer on your way home and buy an accompanying piece of fruit that matches the scents. Pour yourself a glass of Chardonnay and bite into a green apple; the yellow-white pulp may even match the color of the grape juice in your glass. Now that you are fully frugivorous (an animal that consumes mainly fruit), your favorite winery has decidedly begun to produce more complicated wines, because a consultant told the winemaker to do so! Our winemaker in the story above adds to the description of her wine - "leather and tar... a bit toasty," she says. But she goes on to explain the use of aging in wood. And we already talked about how the French are famous for helping us add flavors to the wine that wouldn't necessarily be prevalent in the grape's natural development. Taste. ...Chewing. Chewing your wine, sloshing it around in your mouth, is as important as swirling because you want to fully expose your palate to the complex scents and tastes that the wine offers. ...Do you experience the balance on all sides of the tongue? Learning to let your tongue do the talking is important. You don't even have to train your tongue, just learn the points of recognition that it offers and you will have a more educated wine drinking experience. -Sweetness is determined at the tip of the tongue. A wine is either "sweet" or "dry." Reds are considered dry wines and whites will have the dual pleasure of being sweet (e.x. Riesling) or dry. A dry white simply means not as sweet, but dry wines will have their varying levels of not being as sweet - so buyer beware, or in the case of wine drinking: buy, drink, get drunk and do it all over again until you can figure out what wines fit your fancy. -Acidity (or sourness) is recognizable on the sides of the tongue. Grapes are not related to grapefruits, but they both contain acids that are important during the growing process. When the acids are fermented in grape juice they provide cleansing freshness to the finished product. -Tannins are a bitter, natural preservative that is tasted at the back of the tongue and inner cheeks. ...You swallow and the bitterness of the wine puckers your mouth... The wine has the kick of steeped tea. Along with the first sip of your fresh brewed tea, you'll find tannins in under ripe bananas or the film of a walnut. Fun. -Alcohol in wine will burn the back of your throat. A hot climate and an even hotter growing season will produce high sugar contents in grapes. And with high sugar, comes heavy alcohol. The goal of any winemaker is to create a balanced wine so one of the abovementioned tastes will not dominate the drinking process. Remember our host in the story above when she states, ...Equilibrium begins at the vineyard level. It is important that the grapes are monitored throughout the growing season. If a vineyard is going to give birth to a grape, just like a child, the parents want to make periodic checkups to ensure everything is developing proportionately. So, when farmers, winemakers and consultants talk about "pruning and minimizing yields" they are trying to create a balance in the grape's natural resources. Ten fingers, ten toes, hand out the cigars. But, wait... ...Give it a second, the finish will provide you with a sense of the wine's elegance. A wine's "finish" is simply how long the taste lingers in your mouth after drinking. Many connoisseurs will attest that the finish is a reflection of the care put forth by the makers to produce a quality ("balanced") wine. During the finish you can take a second or a minute to think about this and to create a memory of what you just drank; but, hopefully that memory will be part of a larger memory of an evening well spent with family and friends enjoying food, wine, stories and laughter. It would be a travesty to only remember that you spent a terrible amount of money on a bottle of wine that wasn't appreciated for how it added to the experience, because the experience is what the father in our story above would have wanted you to appreciate.
Wine Post (3 of 3) - August'05 Back to home...
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