You don’t have to be an expert in wines to fully appreciate them: with experience and a few simple tricks, you can learn to recognize the most important characteristics. In fact, tasting a wine is not just a simple tasting, but it is a real technical process that allows you to recognize the quality of the product.
Wine tasting: the phases
Whether it is a white wine or a red wine, you need to analyze it through the sense of sight, smell and taste, and this serves to perceive its organoleptic characteristics. Through tasting, you learn to recognize smells, aromas and flavors.
Specifically, tasting a wine involves 3 phases:
• visual analysis,
• olfactory analysis,
• gustatory analysis.
Visual analysis
Visual analysis is the first phase of tasting and allows, through the sense of sight, to identify the family to which the wine belongs based on the color (white, red or rosé), giving an initial evaluation of the product. But what are the parameters that are observed? First of all, the color, but also the clarity or transparency, that is, the presence of particles on the bottom of the bottle. The consistency of the wine, on the other hand, is evaluated for all wines except for sparkling wines. By turning the glass, therefore, you can evaluate the speed of descent of the tears and the arches on the walls of the glass, thus intuiting the alcohol content. If the wine is slower in the descent, for example, you will find yourself in front of a structured, full-bodied and alcoholic wine such as an Aglianico or an Amarone.
Olfactory analysis
Before the actual tasting, the olfactory analysis is performed, smelling the wine holding the glass still, tilted, in correspondence with the nose. By inhaling slowly and deeply, you can get a first impression of the bouquet, identifying the main notes of the wine.
This second phase of wine tasting allows you to describe its scent, associating it with the different families of aromas to which it belongs.
Based on their origin, the scents of wine are divided into:
• primary, therefore coming directly from the type of grape;
• secondary, that is, those that form during the fermentation process;
• tertiary, therefore due to the refinement process.
Taste analysis
Finally, we arrive at the taste analysis: the actual tasting of the wine. The taste buds on the tongue act as sensors and are able to recognize and distinguish 4 fundamental flavors: acid, sweet, salty and bitter.
This allows you to carry out an in-depth analysis of various parameters:
• hardness, divided into tannicity (specific to red wines and for particular white wines), acidity and sapidity, the latter typical of mineral wines;
• softness, depending on the perception of sugar, alcohol or polyalcohols;
• body, through which the structure of the wine is evaluated;
• persistence, that is, the number of seconds during which the flavors of the wine remain in the mouth, after swallowing;
• quality, a judgment rather than a parameter, with which what has just been tasted is summarized.