Drinking wine is simple: tilt the glass and swallow. Well, appreciating wine calls for a lot more. You need to understand wine and should want to get more out of drinking it than just a buzz.
The first thing to understand about wine is that it evolves in the bottle. What you taste today was not that same wine six months ago, and will again be different six months later. That's what makes the product unique, and calls for a good palate and memory.
Most wines are meant to be drunk young - whites before three years and reds before five-six years (from production). It's a fallacy that "the older a wine, the better it is" and many an ignoramus will open that carefully-preserved 10-year-old wine only to find that it's turned into vinegar!
The mechanics of appreciating wine are quite simple, and may be summarised as see-swirl-sniff-sip-savour: you SEE the colour, SWIRL the wine to release the aromas, SNIFF (and sniff again!) to detect these aromas, SIP the wine (first taste, then swallow), and finally SAVOUR the whole experience.
But why do we do all this? First to detect faults, then to check out the quality.
Looking at the wine (always through a plain wine glass, not coloured or cut-glass) tells you many things. If the wine is hazy or fizzy or has particles, that's a clear indication that there may be a problem. Young white wines are normally a very pale yellow, so if you get a deep yellow-coloured liquid, that again should set off alarm bells; conversely, young red wines are bright red to dark red, so if the wine looks brownish it's cause for doubt.
The nose is the most sensitive human organ (contrary to what some believe), conveying a myriad of smells to some 20 million sensory receptors, so smelling the wine should immediately tell most of us what is good (or bad) about it. Wine that is oxidised will taste dry and bitter; a cork taint imparts smells of wet newspaper and even mouldy dog; sulphur taints manifest themselves as rotten egg, burnt rubber or even cat's pee; and a heat-damaged wine (very common in India) comes across as jammy and oxidised.
On the positive side, a good wine's aromas can be ethereal, and with a bit of training and practice, you should be able to detect five distinct families of aromas: fruity, floral, spicy, vegetal and others (leather, butter, vanilla, petrol, coffee, and nuts). Absence of aromas indicates an indifferent quality, while the best wines have ethereal and complex aromas that combine several strands together into a harmonious whole.
Tasting a wine serves to confirm what your nose should have already told you about the wine's quality, as well as to indicate mouthfeel (astringency/ sweetness), body (light/ medium/ full), and character (simple or complex, short or long finish). One swirls the liquid round the palate to get a better sense of taste rather than just swallowing.
The denouement is in finally drinking the wine, savouring the whole experience, enjoying the sensation of a nice wine trickling down the gullet and producing that warm glow inside. And you want to do that again, and again!
Wines I've been drinking: Argentina is the world's sixth largest wine producer, yet there are precious few Argentine wines available here. The Dominio del Plata BenMarco Malbec 2009 (Rs 3,465 in Bangalore) I tasted recently indicated what we're missing: the wine is full-bodied, smooth and complex with aromas of berries, soft tannins and a woody long finish - yum!
The first thing to understand about wine is that it evolves in the bottle. What you taste today was not that same wine six months ago, and will again be different six months later. That's what makes the product unique, and calls for a good palate and memory.
Most wines are meant to be drunk young - whites before three years and reds before five-six years (from production). It's a fallacy that "the older a wine, the better it is" and many an ignoramus will open that carefully-preserved 10-year-old wine only to find that it's turned into vinegar!
The mechanics of appreciating wine are quite simple, and may be summarised as see-swirl-sniff-sip-savour: you SEE the colour, SWIRL the wine to release the aromas, SNIFF (and sniff again!) to detect these aromas, SIP the wine (first taste, then swallow), and finally SAVOUR the whole experience.
But why do we do all this? First to detect faults, then to check out the quality.
Looking at the wine (always through a plain wine glass, not coloured or cut-glass) tells you many things. If the wine is hazy or fizzy or has particles, that's a clear indication that there may be a problem. Young white wines are normally a very pale yellow, so if you get a deep yellow-coloured liquid, that again should set off alarm bells; conversely, young red wines are bright red to dark red, so if the wine looks brownish it's cause for doubt.
The nose is the most sensitive human organ (contrary to what some believe), conveying a myriad of smells to some 20 million sensory receptors, so smelling the wine should immediately tell most of us what is good (or bad) about it. Wine that is oxidised will taste dry and bitter; a cork taint imparts smells of wet newspaper and even mouldy dog; sulphur taints manifest themselves as rotten egg, burnt rubber or even cat's pee; and a heat-damaged wine (very common in India) comes across as jammy and oxidised.
On the positive side, a good wine's aromas can be ethereal, and with a bit of training and practice, you should be able to detect five distinct families of aromas: fruity, floral, spicy, vegetal and others (leather, butter, vanilla, petrol, coffee, and nuts). Absence of aromas indicates an indifferent quality, while the best wines have ethereal and complex aromas that combine several strands together into a harmonious whole.
Tasting a wine serves to confirm what your nose should have already told you about the wine's quality, as well as to indicate mouthfeel (astringency/ sweetness), body (light/ medium/ full), and character (simple or complex, short or long finish). One swirls the liquid round the palate to get a better sense of taste rather than just swallowing.
The denouement is in finally drinking the wine, savouring the whole experience, enjoying the sensation of a nice wine trickling down the gullet and producing that warm glow inside. And you want to do that again, and again!
Wines I've been drinking: Argentina is the world's sixth largest wine producer, yet there are precious few Argentine wines available here. The Dominio del Plata BenMarco Malbec 2009 (Rs 3,465 in Bangalore) I tasted recently indicated what we're missing: the wine is full-bodied, smooth and complex with aromas of berries, soft tannins and a woody long finish - yum!
Alok Chandra is a Bangalore-based wine consultant