Wine tasting is fun, enjoyable and interesting. But at first it isn’t always easy. There’s a lot of folderol and BS. In this series, we’re trying to demystify wine tasting and help people get started.
After passing the WSET Level 1 exam (seriously, everybody can pass that test after a day or two of study), I decided to continue with WSET Level 2. That was a little harder, as we went through the main grape varieties and key wine producing regions for the first time. But no problems with the theoretical knowledge – it’s easy to master for anyone that is willing to dedicate some time and diligence to the studying process.
Level 2 introduced the concept of writing short professional tasting notes, using a simplified version of the WSET systematic approach to tasting. This was easy for people working in the wine industry and most of them jumping straight to Level 3. But me? Well, I struggled and struggled. I diligently bought the 20+ bottles WSET wanted us to taste. I read the label and Googled the wine to see what I should expect to identify. Lucky me, tasting was not examinable at Level 2, as I was not able to identify any secondary of tertiary aromas.
After the wine exam, Matthew and I went to the Kensington Wine Rooms in Notting Hill and took 4-5 samples of various wines (new world, old world, younger, older). The American Zinfandel did it for me and caused a revolution in my primate tasting brain: for the first time in my life I was able to clearly identify the aromas clusters: fruit and oak ageing.
Tasting tip: I bought all the wines required on the Level 2 list from the supermarket. They were mostly acceptable or good with only a couple very good wines. That’s fine for easy drinking but for tasting you need the aromas and flavours to be as precise and characteristic as possible. As a beginner, I believe you need to start with very good and outstanding wines. Plonk will teach you little!
So, full of hope, I registered for WSET Level 3. I chose the online class because I have a full time job. (I need it to support my wine habit!) With this course tasting starts to be important. The recommended tasting wine list was longer and surprise, surprise: there was a blind tasting in the exam. Ouch!
WSET organised a one-day tasting technique class at the beginning of the course, but I did not find it mind-blowingly useful. You have no theoretical knowledge from the course at that point and it’s a struggle not only with calibration – is my ‘full bodied’ the same as yours or WSET’s, for example. Worse you have almost no frame of reference or understanding of the concepts described. This is an important class so if you are taking it, I would recommend preparing for it very carefully.
(As an online student, I thought WSET should have included an additional full day of tasting class at the end of the course, so that you fine tune your technique. Or at least offer it as an option at additional cost.)
Learning wine tasting from scratch is not easy. After my one-day tasting class I realised how weak I was when it comes to my tasting technique. I bought a number of books to help, listened to podcasts, especially the Guild of Sommeliers’ excellent series. And I even searched the internet looking for a manual on how to become a tasting guru in ten easy steps. You might say that one can’t learn to dance by reading a book and it may be the same with wine tasting. But it’s disappointing that there isn’t a simple and practical book to get you started.
I’ve also learned that developing your own tasting techniques needs time, practice and cross checking with other people. I guess you need to be patient with yourself and try to attend as many tasting sessions as possible.
But in the meantime, if you don’t have time nor patience, or too much money to spend on tasting classes, what do you do? Hands on, full of enthusiasm (and maybe a small fear of failure) I started my journey to become a blind tasting guru. During this process I felt like a spy, trying to gather as much intel to build my own map of professional tasting.
I might be wrong, I might be right, but here is my personal guide to becoming a tasting guru in 10 simple steps, based on what I learned over the last year and a half.
Your own body and the environment affect tasting. There are a few things you need to know before you even open the bottle:
I would recommend taking out the wines for tasting from their storage place and keeping them for two or three hours at room temperature.
Opinions vary about the tasting temperature, but for me it works best at room temperature, as between 18-20°C a wine will have the most volatile aromas for you to identify (yes, whites too). Too cold and you will struggle to smell. That’s probably why cheap wine is best served cold – you won’t miss the complexity if you can’t smell it. Too warm and the aromas will become stewed and you will struggle to identify the complex ones.
In the end, remember: find your own preferred tasting temperature, but keep in mind if you are having a tasting exam that in the exam situation, the wines will always be at room temperature.
Pour your tasting sample at least 30-60 minutes before you start your tasting if you are using the Coravin or opening a new bottle of wine. For all professional tastings, wine are usually decanted or double decanted a couple of hours before. A complex wine changes with the air contact, so give it a little bit of time to breathe and show off its treasures.
Clarity: look if the wine is clear or hazy. Hazy is not a good sign, unless you are having one of those natural wines, unfiltered. The Wine Folly blog has a nice illustration that pictures different wine colours but we’re using the WSET Systematic Approach to Tasting and it’s vocabulary here.
You can assess the colour intensity if you tilt your glass at 45° angle, so that the liquid comes closer to the rim of the glass and see where the colour fades. That’s why it is important to pour the recommended sample quantity.
If the colour from the bottom of the glass starts fading before it reaches the core (middle of the glass), the wine has a pale intensity. If the colour pigment goes all the way to the rim of the glass the intensity is deep, everything in the middle is medium intensity.
Keep in mind that the colour intensity in combination with the colour itself can start to give you some hints about the grape variety and age of the wine.
In red wines, the colour intensity can give you a hint about the type of grape used. For example, lighter colours indicate thinner grape skin varieties like Pinot Noir, Nebbiolo, Grenache while a deeper colour points to thicker grape skin types like Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot or Shiraz. Put a glass of Pinot Noir and a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon next to each over and see the difference.
WSET uses the following colours, being very specific of when you can call them
What colour and its intensity can tell us about the wine?
The lines on the side of the glass that the wine makes when you swirl it and let it settle are called legs (sometimes called tears of wine). Depending on their clinginess on the glass surface, the viscosity, thickness of the lines and their duration give hints about body or sugar content or alcohol level.
Here are some tips:
Of all the senses we use to analyse wine, smell is the most important. The human body has more sensors to identify smell than taste buds in the mouth. As a rough proportion, ‘your nose knows’ and will give you 60-80 percent of the analysis of a wine, while the rest will come from sight and taste.
Smell is deeply linked to one’s memories, like Proust and his madeleines. We all smell things in life in general and in wine in particular, but the most difficult aspect is to recognise specifically what you are smelling. This comes with practice and training. The smell memory is there but, like learning the vocabulary of a different language, our brain needs help to link the words with the experience. That’s why making your own aroma board or using Le Nez du Vin will help you build these associations. Also tasting in a group helps because you can share notes with other people as you taste.
But try not to overthink when you are smelling. Let your instinct take control and tell you what you are getting. And it’s good advice to taste in silence to let the wine talk before you start discussing it in earnest.
Write down what you are smelling and then group them into aroma clusters and categories. Document which one is predominant. Usually a more complex wine will be more difficult to smell, as your brain will be confused with so many aromas. But take it easy and one at a time.
You will hear a lot about aroma clusters. What are they in simple terms?
If you want to dive into more details, you can check the WSET Level 3 Wine Lexicon.
Besides identifying specific aromas and grouping them in their respective clusters, you can start forming an opinion about two elements you need in reaching the quality assessment: aroma intensity and complexity. Intensity, on a scale of light-medium-pronounced, is an interesting clue to the style of wine.
Being very visual and structured, I made this diagram in my effort to crack the concepts of intensity, based on the fragments of information given during the one-day WSET tasting class. In normal terms it should not be such a hard topic. But when you are in an exam it is not so straightforward.
Delicate: the aromas are subtle. This feels like the scent a woman wearing a good quality perfume leaves behind her.
Intense: the aromas will hit your nose straight away. Feels a bit like a man that put on too much aftershave. Usually very aromatic wines like Sauvignon Blanc, Gewürztraminer, Muscat or heavily-oaked wines will be intense.
Simple: there is not much going on. You will have only primary aromas coming from the fruit in most cases and not too many of them.
Complex: you will start smelling two or three distinct clusters of primary, secondary and tertiary aromas. They can be entirely primary (like floral, citrus fruit, tropical fruit, herbal) or can be secondary or tertiary as well. In simple terms, there is a lot going on in that glass.
Generic: you will struggle to pin-point specific aromas and everything will be muddled. For example, you will smell red fruit, but you would struggle to say if is is cherry, strawberry or raspberry.
Well-defined: you will be capable of identifying easily specific aromas without having to think too much. you will be capable of saying without difficulty that the wine smells of roses, tar, truffles and tobacco, for example, in an aged Barolo.
You can also assess how the fruit feels. Usually, an unripe fruit (herbaceous: green bell pepper, grass, leafiness, asparagus) will indicate a cooler climate, while a ripe fruit (dried fruits, jammy, preserved fruits) will come from a warm climate. You don’t want the extremes as this will make the wine unbalanced.
Is the wine youthful, developing, fully developed or tired and past its best?
Assessing the development of the wine on the nose can give you indications about level of readiness for drinking. This is useful information to have on hand if you are laying down wine in a cellar.
Once we’ve looked at the wine and smelled it, we just need to tie up the loose ends. Palate assessment – actually tasting the wine – is the most pleasant of all the wine assessment stages, as you actually get to have the real feel of the liquid you are tasting. You’re actually drinking the wine!
Our tongue and taste buds can taste: bitterness, sourness, saltiness and sweetness. You can detect Tannins on the tongue and gums.
Here are some tips:
On the palate, the key elements are: balance, flavour intensity and finish.
The balance concept means that acidity, alcohol and tannin can all sit at the same table equally. None of them is jumping out.
This measures the level of residual sugar in the wine. Most wines will be dry (consumer preference today), which means that the residual sugar will be less than 4g/L.
The table below describes the sweetness categories based on WSET systematic approach:
| Sweetness | Residual sugar |
| Dry | Less than 4h/L |
| Off dry | 5-9g/L |
| Medium – dry to medium- sweet | 10-45g/L |
| Sweet | Above 45g/L |
| Luscious | The very sweetest wines |
To adapt your palate to these levels of sweetness I would suggest that you make sugar solutions, using the proportions in the table and taste them yourself. You can also add a couple of drops of lemon juice, as most wines will have various levels of acidity. Most white and nearly all red wine is dry so if you get a sweetness that can tell you a lot about the identity of the wine.
This is the sensation of sourness and freshness in a wine. This is a good thing, as it preserves the wine and it gives its backbone. It also makes it refreshing to drink.
I find very difficult to judge wine acidity if the fruits in the wine are very ripe, especially in a red wine. One trick I leaned to do from school: you swirl the wine in your mouth and then you spit and tip your head forward. If a waterfall of saliva comes down in your mouth, the wine has a high acidity. Other people can detect acidity as a tingling on their gums.
I tried using the Litmus paper, dipping it in every tasted wine, but wine is an acidic drink, no matter if we call it a low acidity or a high acidity. Unfortunately, that was a dead end.
It will take some time until you calibrate the acidity perception. As a rule of thumb, a saliva waterfall, means always high acidity. Somewhere in the middle is medium. Almost nothing, low acidity.
Tannin is extracted from red grape skins, grape stems, seeds and oak. It is the mouth drying and astringent sensation that you feel on your gums. If you drink black coffee or black tea, you will easily identify the sensation. Tannin is an important component in red wine (and a few whites). If it comes from the grape itself, this helps a wine have a longer ageing potential. As a rule, the thicker the grape skin, the higher the tannin. The good news is that tannin becomes milder and more integrated with the wine as it ages.
Of course, there are different levels of tannins in the wine. This was easy for me in determining which one is low, medium or high. You just need to taste a Pinot Noir (low tannin), a Malbec or Merlot (medium tannin) and a Cabernet Sauvignon or Nebbiolo (high tannin) in the same tasting and you will figure out easily which one is which.
This is another tricky one, as it is quite difficult to teach your palate to identify different levels. We are lucky that the alcohol content is written on the label, so this is also the easiest variable to calibrate. For me, the moment of truth came when I realised that wines above 13% abv start slightly burning my gums. Other people feel a sensation of warmth at the back of their mouth.
Most wine these days is medium alcohol with 13% – 14% abv and the historical trend is to higher levels of alcohol. Everything below 11% abv would be low alcohol, while everything above 14% abv will be high. Above 14.5% abv, I feel a warmth in my mouth, but you can be tricked if the grapes are very ripe. Usually, the higher the sugar content in the grapes, the higher the alcohol. This is why wine from sunnier, New World regions are often higher in alcohol because fruit there ripens more, generating more sugar to turn into alcohol.
I touched a bit on the body when we were talking about tears, legs and viscosity. Body is defined as the mouthful sensation and can be light – medium – full. A light body wine will feel very watery in your mouth (as if you are having water with different flavours). A full body will feel like a juice with pulp, with a lot of things going on and a bite to it. You can almost chew it. A medium body will be like a normal juice, somewhere in the middle. A lot of wine text books use the comparison with skimmed milk, semi-skimmed and full milk. But that comparison doesn’t work for me.
Try and have it with orange juice with a dash of vodka or vermouth in it (I reckon 25ml of a 40% abv alcohol and 50 ml of non-alcoholic liquid to give you a rough 15% abv drink). Have three own cocktail made glasses: one with orange flavoured water for light body, one with normal orange juice and one with a freshly squeezed orange juice (don’t cheat, same quantity of alcohol in each glass!).
You also need to be aware that a high acidity makes wine feel lighter in body, while sugar, higher levels of tannin, alcohol might affect the sensation of body.
Flavour intensity and characteristics identification is a similar process with the aromas detection on the nose. Usually, our palate should be able to confirm to us what we smelled on the nose. The reason for this is that when the wine gets warmed up in the mouth, the volatile aromas rise up to the back of your nose (retro-nasal passage) and you actually smell rather than taste. Keep in mind that if you get something completely different on the palate you should go back to the smelling exercise.
A couple of considerations:
Now take a look back at the tongue map and pay more attention where you taste different flavours.
Finish is the aftertaste that stays in your mouth after you spat or swallowed the wine. You should note down your impressions on the finish and the length. Was it a pleasant? Was there something that you didn’t like about it?
In the wine assessment, finish can be short, medium or long. A short finish lasts for only a couple of seconds. This is usually found in generic, inexpensive wines. A medium finish lasts up to one minute, while a long finish can last a minute and more, triggering layers of pleasant taste in your mouth, after you spat or swallowed. A long finish is the attribute of a fine wine.
I tend to chew a bit and make a mental record of what flavours I get and for how long they last before I make my assessment.
After going through all this complicated process, we reached the most important one: the quality assessment of the wine we are tasting. There are debates in terms of the criteria used to assess the quality of the wine. Some prefer to do the assessment with the price in mind and you will often meet this phrases: ‘good value for money’ or ‘very good for the price’.
Personally, I like the WSET approach when they recommend rating based purely on quality, with the price not being part of the equation. Frankly, when you do blind tasting, you don’t know the price or the make of the wine. There are plenty of studies that show that people’s expectations affect their evaluations so evaluating the wine blindly is likely to produce more honest assessments.
Usually there is a price quality link, but don’t get fooled by this. There are a lot of famous but massively overpriced wines out there. They might be expensive because they come from famous regions, famous producers and people want to collect them or just speculate based on limited quantities. The flip side is that you can also find relatively cheap wines with outstanding quality. You just need to know how to spot the good stuff.
During my last trip to Italy I came across this concept in the fine wine category: there are wines for wine collectors and wines for wine drinkers and aficionados. Belonging to the second category, I have no interest in collecting wine to keep in a museum or for speculative future profit. I like to enjoy my wine and I want to die happy with an empty cellar.
When assessing the quality of the wine, four aspects you can take four factors into consideration: balance, intensity, finish and complexity.
Balance. A wine is balanced if all the elements of the wine support each other – all the legs of the table are the same length. Sweetness, acidity, tannin, fruitiness, aromatic components, alcohol should be well integrated. I think it would be easier if I give below some examples of unbalanced wine:
Intensity of the aroma and flavours or concentration.
Finish, including how pleasant and lasting is the wine flavour aftertaste.
Complexity – look from different angles:
To reach the conclusion, we take into account the four criteria listed in Step 7: balance, aroma intensity, finish, complexity to which we add a fifth one: character. The character means that the wine is a true representation of its grape varietals or regional style.
I am leaving out the “Faulty” rating, as this implied that the wine has flaws that make it undrinkable.
The WSET textbook doesn’t explain this concept of ‘a positive’, so I tried to formulate my own interpretation. In my view, a positive means the ultimate expression of one criteria, such as complete balance, pronounced intensity, long finish and complexity. A combined positive means that you have two medium conclusions, such as medium finish and medium intensity which you can consider a positive together.
If you know what you are assessing, you can skip the joys of trying to identify the wine. The film Somm shows aspiring Master Sommeliers trying to develop this skill. It looks like voodoo Deryn Brown stuff when they do it but actually you need a combination of heuristics, knowledge and good a good tasting memory.
You need to know:
But here’s the thing: even if it takes time to become an expert, just starting down this road and testing your skills in blind tasting can dramatically enhance your enjoyment of wine. And can help you understand why you like some wines more than others.
Remember, even the most experienced tasters don’t get it right all the time. Indeed, for WSET Level 3, identifying the wine in a blind tasting is only worth a few points. You can easily pass the exam if you identify all the other elements.
I am still a beginner in this art of blind tasting identification and at my level of knowledge I need to identify the grape and maybe guess the region.
However, you can ask yourself the following questions:
White: is the wine aromatic (Sauvignon Blanc, Viognier, Gewürztraminer, Riesling, Muscat) or more neutral (Chardonnay, Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc, Garganega)
Red: is the wine lighter in colour – thin skins (Pinot Noir, Nebbiolo, Sangiovese, Grenache) or darker – thick skins (Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Shiraz, Carmenere), does it have low tannin (Pinot Noir) or high tannins (Cabernet Sauvignon, Nebbiolo)?
Do you find the wine more fruity, with more alcohol and body, less acidity, riper tannin (warm climate) or with fresher fruit, higher acidity, lighter body, more astringent tanning (cool climate)?
Do you find the wine more savoury, with higher acidity and tannin (Old World) or it tastes fruitier, with fruit more clearly defined (New World). How wine aromas appear to you: more subtle and complex (Old World – France) or well defined (New World)?
There are four main categories we can consider when we talk about readiness for drinking and the potential for ageing. For the wines that have potential for ageing, they depend on the grape varietal and the quality of the vintage.
| Too young | Can drink now, but has potential for ageing | Drink now, not suitable for further ageing | Too old |
When we talked about the nose, we have made a first assessment of the development of the wine.
The wine development assessment will lead you to the readiness for drinking conclusion, per below summary table:
Youthful
Fully Developed
Tired/ past its best
| Conclusion | Too young | Can drink now, but has potential for ageing | Drink now, not suitable for further ageing | Too old |
| Development | Youthful | Developing | ||
| Other notes | You think that the wine will be much better in a few years’ time and it is a waste to drink now | You think that with time the wine will develop more | Wine either best drunk young or wine that has already aged and further ageing will not improve it |
Unfortunately there is no magic formula when it comes to the price of the bottle of wine. There are different factors that affect the price of the wine. Also, in some cases, the price is not a true representation of the wine quality.
Price/ bottle = grape cost + wine making cost + ageing cost + producer margin + transportation cost + seller margin + duty + VAT
For WSET, inexpensive wine is everything below £6 per bottle. Premium wine is more expensive than £20 per bottle, with the mid-priced and high-priced in the middle.
Remember that when you buy a bottle of cheap wine in the UK, the Treasury is taking the lion’s share of your money in tax. Excise duty is £2.08 per 75cl bottle of still wine and £2.67 per 75cl bottle of sparkling wine. And then there is 20% VAT on top of that.
