Out of all the beverages globally — from milkshakes to bourbon to whiskey, none are as delectable and as indicative of sophistication and good taste as wine. To the initiated, wines are an absolute treat to the palate and a great way to bring out the flavor of the food you are pairing with.
Unlike most drinks, alas, who are new to drinking wine, often have difficulty trying to figure out what makes a wine delicious. They are unable to tell apart a low-quality wine from a high quality wine. What exactly are the things that we have to look for?
Here is a short guide on how you can become the quintessential wine connoisseur and be able to tell apart wines that barely do anything for the palate from wines that will make you want to come back for more.
Sight
The first and foremost step that you can take to tell if the wine is high quality is simply looking at it and checking for things such as the richness of the color and the overall opacity.
One trick popular among wine lovers to visually pre-qualify wine as rich and high quality is to examine it for ‘legs.’ What you would usually do is swirl the wine around a little bit so that the wines touch the edges of the glass. Then you would raise your glass towards the light and examine whether there are tear-shaped droplets. The number of droplets that you find and how slow they fall indicates the flavor’s viscosity and the richness of the alcohol.
Smell
Many guides on the internet give a very detailed explanation about what you should look for when you smell your wine. You should take these guides with a little bit of a grain of salt because it all boils down to personal preference.
When you take a whiff at your wine, you should only focus on three things. The first would be the fruitiness and sweetness of the aroma, the secondary aroma that indicate the type of method used to make the wine, and finally, the richness of the smell that could indicate the age of the wine.
Taste
The most crucial step in figuring out the quality of the wine is, of course, to taste just a little bit of it. This is why the waiter would usually pour you a little bit of wine so that you can approve it for him to pour the rest.
Tasting wine requires a little bit of practice and a more refined palette. It is not easy in the beginning to capture all the slight flavors and subtle tastes.
It is also important to remember that you will also be looking for two tastes – an initial bite and a finish. Both low and high-quality wines usually start strong, but only the high-quality wines have an excellent finish.
With a little bit of practice, there is no doubt that you will be able to get the hang of it and tell different types of wines apart. You can even take it a step further and judge how a specific kind of wine goes with varying types of food. Wine tasting is one of the most sophisticated hobbies that you can take on, and when your palate is more refined, not only will you be able to enjoy different types of wine more – you will always find yourself coming back for more.
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