Enjoying wine is simple!
Once you’ve acquired the taste for wine, it’s quite easy to open a bottle, pour, sip, and enjoy.
All the growing and the cooking has been done for you by viticulturists and winemakers to give you Earth and Sun’s ready-to-drinking goodness.
But if you want to appreciate wine a little further than a simple 1-snif, 2-sip, 3-swallow, and get to really understand what you’re drinking, there is a simple discipline to observe, and a few tricks to know.
In this wine knowledge article for Vivino I shared and explained how rigorously obersving the typical three phases in wine tasting can allow you to perceive a lot more from your wine, and use all your senses.
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Observing, ‘The Appearance’:
“Your first contact with a wine is visual, when you first pour it out of the bottle and into a glass. Like when meeting somebody, the first impression is crucial, and actually influences the whole tasting experience that follows. Humans are very visual creatures after all.”
This is why taking the time to have a thorough look at and through your wine glass can be very telling about what you’re about to put in your mouth.
Read more on the original article at Vivino: The Three Phases in Wine Tasting.
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Smelling, ‘The Nose’
“Taking the time to sniff the surface of the wine into the glass allows: 1) to confirm or not your impressions from the preceding visual observations, 2) to give you a first hint what the wine is going to taste like when you sip.”
This phase first allows you to confirm the impressions you may have had from looking at the wine. It will obviously also tell you a low more about the beverage.
Is it fruity, grassy, spicy? You will form a first mental image about the wine that will get you to anticipate and prepare yourself to properly taste it on your palate.
As we explained in another piece: swirling the wine helps evaporate more aromas from the surface of the wine, concentrating fragrances for your nose to smell bette.
Here you might already be able to tell the difference between a Cabernet, Chardonnay, or a Pinot Noir.
Read more on the original article at Vivino: The Three Phases in Wine Tasting.
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Tasting, ‘The Palate’
“[] here comes phase three, the most hedonistic of all (the one that provides the most enjoyment), but also the one that tells you all about the wine.”
The moment you put the wine into your mouth is not only the most enjoyable part of wine tasting, it is when you really undress the beverage completely, and when you can use almost all your senses to make the most of it: taste, smell, AND touch.
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