How to Taste Wine:

Drinking wine is easy…just put the glass up to your lips and let her fly.  Tasting wine is
a bit more of a challenge. Doing it well can add to your enjoyment and help you to really understand wine and appreciate it.  There are three basic steps to the wine tasting process.  Follow these steps, and you’ll be well on your way to recognizing and distinguishing a wine's characteristics, and enjoying the experience.  Sharing this experience with friends and family creates great bonds between people.

The first (and most important) rule of tasting wine:

This is not a test. Wine tasting is subjective. What tastes good to you, is a good wine. Wine that has hints of strawberry to you, may not be perceived by somebody else.  It’s all about what you enjoy and why you enjoy it.

Sight

The wine should be poured into a clear glass, about 1/3 to 1/2 full, and held by the stem up to the light or against a white background, so the color can be examined clearly.  Tilting the glass and looking at the wine through the rim helps show the variation from the deepest color to the lightest.

The initial color of a wine is primarily determined by its grape variety and the intensity of that wine.  As an example, Pinot Noir is typically one of the lighter colored reds, but a high end, intense Pinot will likely be darker than a simple, fruity one.

The age of a wine can often be detected by its color.  Red wines start out as a deep purple color, however, in time, the wine loses it’s youthful intensity and takes on more of a red brick or orange tone.

White wines are not actually white; they range from a tint of green to straw to yellow to brown. More color in a white wine usually indicates more flavor and age.  While time improves many red wines, it spoils most white wines.

Next, prepare to smell the wine by swirling the wine in it’s glass. Swirling is usually easiest if you rest the glass on a table and rotate it gently in a circle.

Swirling will also give sight clues.  Higher alcohol, more intense wines, will typically have more pronounced legs that last longer.

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Scent

Swirl then smell your wine by placing your nose as far inside the glass as you can. What scent do you detect?  Musty?  Fruity? Oaky?  Are the scents subtle, or do they jump out at you?  Swirling releases molecules in the wine allowing you to smell the aroma and bouquet of the wine, also called the nose.  The two main techniques that wine tasters use are:

1.) Take a quick whiff and formulate an initial impression, then take a second deeper whiff, or

2.) Take only one deep whiff.

Either way, after you smell the wine, sit back and contemplate the aroma.  Don't try to "taste" the wine yet, concentrate only on what you smell.

After trying many wines you will develop a memory for different varietals and notice similarities and differences.  Sometimes a certain smell will be very strong with underlying hints of other smells. Estimates of the number of different smells humans can detect are in the thousands.  Take your time.  By identifying a scent you will probably remember it better.  You may even want to keep a notebook of your impressions of wines, and save the labels.

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To get the full taste experience of a wine follow the following three steps:

1. Initial taste: This is where the wine awakens your senses (your taste buds respond to sensations).
2. Taste: Swish the wine around in your mouth and draw in some air.  Swallow a little bit and focus on what is happening in your mouth.  Is it light or rich?  Smooth or harsh? Do you feel a drying sensation?  Or is it velvety smooth? You will be able to analyze the wine’s flavors, its intensity and its texture.
3. Aftertaste: Spit or swallow the wine and then breathe through your nose.  Take a moment to examine the finish of the wine.  The better the wine, the longer it will linger in the back of your mouth. Take a moment to evaluate its overall flavor and balance. Is the wine simple or complex?  Is the taste appropriate for that type of wine? Does the wine make you pucker (high acidity)? Does it leave a thick coating in your mouth (sweet)?

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Kelley Cellars uses several sources for individual wine ratings and tasting notes.  Most of the sources utilize a similar scale for ratings that works as follows:

Please note that not all wines in the shop are scored by our sources.  Some of the wineries do not submit their wines for scores, because they believe, “you can’t drink a score”.  Also, we do not always agree with the scores given (i.e. we may think a wine deserves 87 points, when one or more of our sources may say it deserves 84 points).

ALL wines in our shop have passed our test for price/value, and you will see that many have ratings from the sources we access.

Why are there different scores from the various sources? Tasting is a personal experience and everyone values attributes differently. Some of the agencies give higher scores to “big & bold”, while some give big scores to complex wines with intricate subtleties.  Of course, what matters the most is what you think – so please come to our Saturday tastings and try for yourself!

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