The wine tasting process

The wine tasting process is a natural one. All that needs to be done when 'learning' to taste Rosemount Estate wine is to remember and express what you experience when tasting wine. Remember that there is no right or wrong answer in wine tasting, and writing down your thoughts will help you recall these wine experiences in the future.

Sight

To begin, pour a small sample of the wine into your glass and tilt it slightly away from yourself, preferably against a white background such as a wall, shirt cuff or tablecloth, and examine the wine's colour and clarity.

First impressions often count when it comes to assessing a wine. Just by looking at a wine you can determine its:

Condition - wine should be brilliant and clear and not cloudy or murky
Age - young white wines range in colour from almost clear white to clear yellow
As white wines age their colour deepens to a rich, golden colour. With excessive age they will go brown, a sure sign that the wine is past its prime and probably unpleasant to drink. If a young wine as a brownish tinge it is possibly oxidised.

The rules about colour change slightly when it comes to red wines. Aged reds tend to lose their deep, youthful purple colour and go a paler, brick red colour over time.

A wine's colour will also depend on the variety. Young sauvignon blancs are almost clear with green tints, while a barrel fermented chardonnay can have a deep straw colour. The same is true for red wine. Lighter styles of reds such as pinot noir are a usually a light red colour, cabernet sauvignons are deep purple, while some big Australian shiraz wines can be almost black.

Swirling the glass and resting it upright can also give you a clue to the alcohol content of the wine. The drops running down the side of the glass (referred to as the tears or legs), are an indication of how alcoholic the wine is: the more numerous and thicker the drops, the higher the alcohol level.

Smell
Looks can sometimes be deceiving so the next stage of assessing a wine's quality and condition is by smell. To begin, swirl your wine in the glass a few times and take a couple of full, quick sniffs but not too many as our sense of smell can become easily fatigued. By swirling the wine, aromas are released, which can tell you many things about the wine such as its variety, whether it has had oak treatment or if it is faulty.

The aroma should be clean and fresh. If the wine is young you should be able to smell the characteristic scents associated with the variety.

riesling is limey
chardonnay smells like peaches
shiraz is peppery
cabernet sauvignon smells like blackcurrants
With experience, you may even be able to detect what type of oak a winemaker has used - American oak can smell like vanilla while French oak has a restrained lemony/cashew-like scent.

However, when first trying to describe a wine it can be difficult. Wine consists of more than 200 different chemical compounds, many of which are identical or similar to those found in fruits, vegetables, spices, herbs, flowers and other substances. By using these descriptors, wine writers, marketers and judges are able to describe the individuality of a wine.

A good training exercise is to concentrate on the smells in a kitchen (vegetables, fruit, bread, jam and butter), and then go out into the garden (flowers, herbs, spices and grass). With a little practice you should start experiencing these different smells in wine.

A wine's faults can also be detected by the nose. These faults won't harm you but if they are noticeable they will make drinking the wine unpleasant.

A vinegar smell is caused by acetic acid
A nail polish smell reflects the formation of ethyl acetate
A rubbery, rotten egg or garlic smell are by-products of sulfides
A mouldy or wet cardboard aroma can indicate cork taint (where the cork has been contaminated by naturally occurring but foreign chemicals)
Sip
Tasting can reveal aspects of a wine that smelling cannot: such as complexity - the combination of the wine's aroma and flavour sensations. Tasting a wine will also tell us about its richness, its texture and its balance.

The best way to taste a wine is to take a small mouthful and move the wine around your mouth covering all of your taste buds. Next, purse your lips and suck air across the wine. This process helps to aerate the wine and bring out its flavours and any faults. Humans can detect four basic tastes (sweet, sour, bitter and salty), and it is the first three that we normally encounter when tasting wine.

The same descriptors used when describing a wine's aromas are also used to describe the wines flavour sensations. Be aware of the wine's flavour and style, the balance between acid and sweetness, and the persistence of flavour. The key to a wine's quality and complexity is whether all of its different elements are in harmony with one another.

Tasting will also tell you about the wine's texture: whether it is thin, luscious, smooth, dry or astringent (excessive tannin) or hot and harsh (high alcohol).

After spitting or swallowing the wine the next step is to determine the wine's finish - how long you can still taste the wine's flavours. Well-made wines have a long, lingering finish.

For advice on food matching for Rosemount Estate wines, see the Food & Wine section of this site.


The wine tasting process