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Appreciating Wine
Wine Tasting: works even without the pearls.
Wine, good wine, the one you have spent quite a sum of money on, is a hot commodity. It certainly deserves more than a quick sip while you try to swallow your food. Since you have managed to buy the thing (hopefully it comes in a bottle) you might as well try to get the most of the experience. Appreciating and savoring wine can seem a little involved (pro tip: it's not, really) and most people seem to think of it as snobbish. Regardless of opinions, properly tasting wine is the only true way of enjoying it, so you owe it to yourself to at least know how. On the plus side it makes you cooler, so if you want to be a stag do yourself a favor and follow the following steps.
On this first article we will take a look at the first steps into wine appreciation. We still have a long way before we do anything involving our mouth and tongue. First we must learn to enjoy wine with our other senses. First, is sight:
Inspecting the Wine
A simple glance at your wine can give you lots of information about it's characteristics and quality. Good contrast is needed for this exercise so make sure to view the wine on plain clear glass against a white background (like a table cloth.) There are three things you are looking for here: color, legs and bead.
- Color: Color is usually a great indicator for the age of the wine. Most young red wines start out with an intense and saturated red or purple color. With time, they loose this intensity and start taking on a paler hue, similar to the color of bricks. White wine also changes color, but the change is different than on the red wines. White wines, start their life as a pale golden yellow. With age, and contrary to red wines, they start taking on a deeper tone and become a golden amber akin to the color of well preserved mead.
- Legs: We call legs to the oily droplets that run down the sides of the glass after you swirl the wine. Legs were usually inspected as a measurement of the quality of the wine: slow forming oily legs reflected a high alcohol content or the presence of sugars, both an indication of quality. You will generally find this oily traces in well preserved and premium wines, will the usual head busters at the Sunday barbecue will more liquid and less dense.
- Bead: This is a term that deals with sparkling wines and has to do with he size of the bubbles generated by the wine. Therefore we can say (for instance) that Champagne has a finer bead (smaller bubbles) that other wines. Not surprisingly this finer bead is a quality usually sought for. Some even say that you can tell the quality of the bead by listening to the wine... which is probably a lie but it will surely serve as a crowd puller if you happen to be on a hen night and things are going slowly.
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