Unlock the secrets to tasting wine like a pro! This easy-to-follow guide covers everything you need to boost your confidence and get you started.

You don’t need to go full wine-snob. I just wanted to clear that out before I teach you how to get there. Uncork, pour, a little sniffity sniff, and drink it up. That’s it: looks like, smells like, and tastes like wine. You don´t need to go deeper than that. But you’ve clicked on an article promising to teach you how to taste wine, and I don’t want to do you a disservice, so let’s go in greater detail.

What Do You Need for Properly Tasting Wine?

Well, you should first get yourself some wine, of course. But you already knew that. Let me list additional stuff you’ll need. Some things will be more obvious than others:

• A wine glass, ideally. Theoretically you just need a container that’s clear, cleans easily, and won’t hold smells. So, avoid plastic. The glass should also be large enough for you to swirl the wine around it. Now, you don’t need to go overboard and buy something expensive. Just make sure it’s clean.
• Something white to put on top of your table. A tablecloth or a napkin, preferably without wrinkles, will work just fine. But you can also use a piece of paper. I will later explain how, but you’ll use the white background to visually examine the wine in your glass.
• Neutral lights are good, but natural light is better. You don’t want lightning to alter the color of the wine you’re tasting.
• A spit bucket. Yeah, I know, why would you spit your wine, right? Am I crazy? Well, you don’t have to, but I promised to go full wine-snob, and here we are. Now, if you’ll be tasting a bunch of wines, my advice is to spit, otherwise you risk not being sober enough to fully appreciate whichever wines happen to be closer to the end of the tasting. Any container will do for a spit bucket, just make sure is not the exact same one as your drinking glass.
• Some water to cleanse your palate if you’re going to be tasting wine and other things at the same time. Don’t necessarily clean your glass with it between wines, because leftover water might dilute the aromatics of the next pour.
• Pen and paper to take notes. Maybe you’ll even want to invest on a notebook for all your tastings. This way, when you taste a Chilean Carménère, you can refer to your notes to see if you’ve found similar aromas. It’ll make it easier for you to hopefully identify one in a blind tasting[i].

Lastly, avoid strong aromas when you do a tasting. Anything from perfume to cigarettes and even food cooked nearby can distract our nose from the wine’s bouquet.

Step-By-Step Guide on Tasting Wine

I’m assuming you already have the wine in the glass, otherwise, the first real step for tasting wine would be to uncork and serve. So, the next step is:

1. Look: Tasting Wine Through Your Eyes

The no-brainer part of this wine tasting step is to see if the wine is red or white[ii]. What you want to do is hold the glass at an angle over the white surface I discussed above. You’re looking for how transparent the wine is. In whites, you’ll often see right through to the table below. Same with some reds, specially around the rim, the outer edge of the wine. But the gradient of the color can tell you a lot more. Let’s get into it!

Body

Typically, you can expect more translucent wines to have a lighter body. A Pinot Noir will not only have a different tone of red from a Cabernet Sauvignon—a ruby red vs a more purple-ish one—but it will also be more see-through. Similarly, a crisp Sauvignon Blank will be of a lighter—almost green—tone, whereas an oaked Chardonnay would be a deeper golden yellow.

Age

Here’s when things get confusing in tasting wines: due to pigment degradation, reds lose color with age, so older wines are more transparent. However, the wine oxidizes gradually, it will also start developing slight brownish tones. As for whites, it’s sort of the opposite. They will gain color with age, so expect deeper, golden hues.

Alcohol and Sugar

Checking out them legs, ain’t you? I’m talking about wine legs. The more they cling to the glass, and the thicker they are the more alcohol or sugar the wine will have. That is because both alcohol and syrup are more viscous than the wine itself.

2. Smell: Tasting Wine Through Your Nose

It goes beyond “it smells like red (or white) wine, though it’s fine if that’s as far as you get at first[iii]! If you want to get good at tasting wine and try your hand at blind tastings, you must get good at catching aromas. Good news is you can practice by smelling things. You will only know that a Carménère smells of green bell peppers if you know what those smell like. So, go to your farmers market and smell everything. With time, you will recognize those scents in your wines.

Just bring the glass close to you face and put your nose inside it. Take a good whiff and that’s the first phase done. Next, give the glass a good swirl to let some air in, and smell the wine again. You’re looking for the differences.

When the wine is still[iv], it will be closed. You will only get the strongest aromas, typically darker—red or black—fruit, and woody or smoky aromas from oak-aging. You swirl the wine vigorously to bring oxygen into it and simulate aging. The wine will open-up, and you will sense more complex fruit aromas and subtle scents of flowers and herbs.

Why do you not just swirl the wine from the get-go? Just to find some differences? Well, yes, basically. Remember, this is about tasting wine like a snob… er… pro! I meant pro. No shortcuts!

3. Taste: Finally Tasting Wine!

Here’s the fun part! Well, almost. Remember you might have to spit the wine out. But that’s later. First you get some of the wine in your mouth and move it around. You might’ve also seen—or heard—a tater make slurping noises. Let’s talk about what’s going on.

Let’s fist cover the moving the wine around part. You want to see how the wine feels under your tongue, on top of your palate, and on the sides of your mouth. This will give you a clearer picture of how tannic and how acidic the wine really is.

The slurping thing has more to do with the actual taste of the wine. That’s what we’re here for after all, right? The flavor of the wine should confirm what you already detected by smelling it and should expand on that. Slurping does the same as swirling the wine in the glass: it introduces oxygen into the equation. Again, the wine will open-up, except this time it’ll happen inside your mouth.

And Then You Spit It Out? Really?

Really. But only if you’re tasting several wines or if you’re driving. Please don’t drink and drive. At this point in the tasting, you can just drink it up and bring your glass forward for the next pour. Ultimately, it’s up to you, depending on how much you’ve already drunk, and how much is left to drink.

4. Ask Yourself: Did I Enjoy It?

A good wine should be balanced: no spikes in acidity, not overly tannic, not too oaky. But that’s textbook. What do you like? Think about how balanced the wine felt to you. Maybe you don’t like lighter reds like País, and that’s okay. You’d rather drink a Malbec. Or maybe you like whites with floral aromas, like a Torrontés.

Unless you’re planning on making a career out of it, you’re only tasting wines for fun and to find those you want to purchase. Deciding which ones are worth your money is an important consideration while sampling.

The Last Drop

You can get sophisticated when tasting wine, but you don’t need to. In my experience, the more you taste, the more curious you get about the process. But also, do you often uncork to taste a wine, or you do so to drink it with friends? In my case, it’s more often the latter. Of course, because I write in this space, I go to tastings, and wineries, and various “wine fests”, but I write a blog about wine. If I didn’t—when I didn’t—I didn’t care about the proper process of tasing wine much.

The most important step in the guide above is the last one. Decide if you like what you’re drinking even if you didn’t even smell it before gulping it in. And don’t get frustrated if you’re not getting that “faintest soupçon of like asparagus and just a flutter of a, like a, nutty Edam cheese[v]”. You’ll get there with time, if you care enough. And if you don’t, that’s one less reason to get frustrated. Just enjoy your wine.

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Footnotes

[i] In a blind tasting, the bottle is hidden from view, so you must taste the wine—and oftentimes try to identify it—without other information than the wine itself. Biases begone!

[ii] Of course, it can also be a rosé or an orange wine. And if it’s a sparkling wine, you will also see bubbles.

[iii] In fact, even experts can get confused when presented with wine poured on black cups. The color of the wine really influences what aromas we perceive.

[iv] Still as in you haven’t moved it yet, as opposed to still as in not sparkling wine.

[v] One of my favorite quotes from the movie Sideways. Miles—a masterclass in acting by Paul Giamatti—puts a finger to his ear while tasting wine and says it. Great scene!

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Cover Image: Wine tasting notes. Photo by Pavel Danilyuk.