The other night I was at a fundraiser for Amy’s Farm www.amysfarm.com at the Press in Claremont, CA. Amy’s is a wonderful organization. It is an organic farm, with a community sponsored agriculture program and tours for school children. The room was filled with school teachers and co-op living hippies, who believe that food is important and the environment is more important. I ordered organic, bio-dynamic wine and swirled it around in my glass a bit. The women sitting around me were all drinking beer. They looked at me, and a little confused, one of the women said, “I really don’t know anything about wine, and I’ve never really understood all the swirling.” As I explained to her the reasons behind why we taste wine the way we do I realized that I’ve been asked that a lot recently. Do here is the method I use for tasting wine and why I do it that way.
Step 1 Smell – Your mouth can only taste 5 flavors (sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and a savory taste called umami) so most of wine tasting is smelling. Many of the flavors (cherries, apples, grass, cat pee) that you perceive as tastes are actually smells. This first quick smell gives your nose a chance to see how much aroma this wine has to offer before you start to move it around your glass.
Step 2 Swirl – Be careful when you do this. It’s very easy to spill all over the nice clothes you are wearing. If you have the opportunity put your glass on a table and holding the base or lower part of the stem, move it in small fast circles. You are trying to make the wine move up the sides of the glass. You want the wine to have as much surface area as possible. The more surface area the more opportunity the wine has to come in contact with your nose.
Step 3 Smell – Time for a second smell. This one will be much more aromatic and this is when you may start to pick out fruit flavors or other smells in the wine.
Step 4 Taste – If you’re by yourself or in a tasting room or at a wine tasting class take a bigger sip than you normally would. If you’re out to dinner or at an art opening or somewhere where people might think you’re weird for making slurping noises, don’t do this. Swish the wine around your mouth. This hits on your sense of taste and your sense of touch. Think about places where your mouth dries out. Ask yourself does it feel like I’ve put gym socks in my mouth, or like I’m sucking or rocks, or has my mouth just gone all puckery like my lemonade is too sour? All these things tell you something about the wine. Gym socks mean tannin, rocks mean minerals, sour lemonade means acid.
Step 5 Smell – The third smell actually happens while the wine is in your mouth. Again, unless you can be really quiet about it, this isn’t something to attempt in polite company. You want to suck air in through your teeth so that the wine’s aroma passes through your nasal cavity in the other direction from your first smell. This is called retro-nasal breathing, and as long as you don’t inhale wine down your windpipe or dribble it onto your clothes, you will experience a whole new set of aromas by doing this.
Step 6 Spit – I know, at first spitting seems somehow wrong, it’s good wine after all, but it’s the only way you will really get a handle on the finish of the wine. The finish is the taste that’s left in your mouth after you spit the wine out. This is another thing you want to do in the privacy of your home or somewhere where other people are also spitting. Do not spit while eating, that’s just gross.
So now you know. All those weird things wine tasters do are actually reasonable choices and not signs of insanity. The next time you’re tasting wine you can do it like a pro.
Trying to Drink for Money 
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