Taste

To most people, tasting wine means taking a sip and swallowing it immediately. This is a common misconception. Tasting is something you do with your taste buds. You have taste buds all over your mouth. They're on both sides of the tongue, underneath, on the tip, and they extend to the back of your throat. When you sip and swallow immediately, you bypass a lot of these important taste buds. By tasting properly and allowing the wine to reach all of your taste buds, your nose is also able to help your brain pull together specific pictures which accurately reflect the different aspects of a wine's taste.

To clarify, let's review some of the tastes of wine, keeping in mind the most important sensations of taste and where they occur on your tongue and in your mouth.

Sweetness: This is tasted on the tip of the tongue. If there is any sweetness in a wine, you'll taste it right away since the tip of your tongue is highly sensitive.

Fruit and Varietal Characteristics: These are tasted in the middle of the tongue after the sweetness has been established.

Acidity: Tasted at the sides of the tongue and on the insides of the cheeks -- acidity is more apparent in white wines than red wines.

Tannin: This is also tasted in the middle of the tongue. Tannin frequently is much more prominent in red wines or wood-aged white wines. It can "dry" the palate to excess when too much tannin is present. Tannin tends to feel astringent on the palate. We like to call it the "wool sweaters on the tongue." Tannins are frequently apparent in bananas, and walnuts and teas.

Finish: The finish, or aftertaste, is the overall taste that lingers after you have swallowed or spit the wine. How long does the taste linger? Usually a sign of a high quality wine is a long, pleasing aftertaste lasting from 15 to 20 seconds after you've swallowed the wine.

As you familiarize yourself with the various tastes of wine, we recommend taking notes on the wines categorized by the sections contained in this booklet, look, smell, etc. Also, we recommend having a cracker or two (unsalted), or another bland substitute, in order to cleanse your palate between tastes. The taste of one wine can influence that of another.

Keep in mind too, that your palate can be influenced by seemingly unrelated things such as what you ate for lunch, or what you smell cooking nearby, etc.

Everything we've discussed so far -- the look, the swirling, the nose and the taste -- happens within a few minutes or so. It is now time for the final step. (And the most fun!)