[EBOOK] Wine 101

Wine 101

Tasting wine is often a daunting process. One of the easiest things to do is decide whether you like a
wine or not. One of the hardest things to do is to describe it. We have all been out to dinner, or been to
a wine tasting, and had someone run through a litany of descriptors that made us look down into the
glass and think to ourselves, “How did they see all that?” The key is to break it down into simple
categories, and learn how to describe what it is we taste. This creates the building blocks to learn and
describe more.

In tasting wine, put things on a scale. Upon first taste, let’s think about the intensity of the wine. Does
it grab you, like a raw onion, or a bite of a Granny Smith apple? Or is it more subtle and subdued? Put
it on a scale of one to ten, and use that as a descriptor. It the wine is very intense, and grabs you right
away, that is towards the higher end of the spectrum, and if it is more subdued, or not very intense,
that is on the bottom part of the spectrum.

Now let’s think about the acidity of the wine. Is the wine acidic, or is it sweet? This attribute will
generally fall somewhere in a range. To take whites for example, if we look at two whites, and one is
a sauvignon blanc and the other is a California chardonnay, often times the sauvignon blanc will be
more crisp and acidic, and the chardonnay will display more sweetness. Where is the wine you are
tasting fall on that spectrum. By thinking about it this way, you can describe an attribute. For
example: “This is a very acidic, crisp wine.”

In the same vein, ask yourself whether the wine is dry or sweet. If it is overly dry, you might have a
mouth feel that you need a drink of a glass water. If it is overly fruity, it might taste too sweet. Try to
put this attribute on a spectrum. Sweetness needs to be described in two ways: Versus dryness, and
versus acidity.

Now let’s think about the body of the wine. To best think about the body of a wine, let’s make a
comparison to milk. If you took 3 glasses, and in one glass poured skim, one glass poured whole milk
and in the third poured heavy cream, you would have noticed varying degrees of consistency and
weight to the three different glasses. The skim milk is the thinnest, with almost a tinge of wateriness,
while the heavy cream is thick and dense. The whole milk falls between the two, not as think as the
skim milk, but not as heavy as the cream. Think of wine along those same lines. Is the wine light-
bodied, medium-bodied or full-bodied? This is a really useful descriptor of a wine.

Next, let’s look at oakiness. Does the wine have no oakiness or wood in the taste, or does it feel as if
you just licked a two-by-four? Generally, you do not want a wine that is at either major extreme,
unless you like to lick plywood. But I will doubt that and move on, as this is a pretty straightforward
attribute.

Tannins are the lifelines of the wine. Tannins come from the skins and stems of the grapes, and on
taste, can often have a drying feeling. I feel it is well described by asking yourself this question when
you taste a wine: Does it feel like I just clapped out two erasers and have the feeling of all that chalk
dust in my mouth? If the answer is yes, than you are getting a lot of tannins. A lot of tannins can often
mean that the wine is “shut down” or “too young” and is hard to get a sense of what is really there, as it is
overpowered by the tannins. Again, having some balance in this attribute is often a good thing. Too
few tannins can often mean that wine lacks structure or an ability to last for the long haul.

The last thing to focus on is complexity. How many flavors do you get when you drink the wine? The
way I like to describe it like making salsa. If I put a bunch of chopped-up tomatoes in a bowl, that is 1
flavor (pretty simple structure). If onions are added, another flavor (and certainly a level of intensity!)

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