A quick guide on how to professionally taste wine

Do you want to get the most out of your wine tasting experience?  Many people think of wine as a simple, relaxing alcoholic beverage. Red or white? Sweet or dry?  I’m not going to deny that I previously thought the same thing.  However, I’ve been working with wine for the last five years and have learned many new aesthetics to wine that I never knew existed. I like to think of each bottle as a story; a never-ending learning experience.  If you take the time to like to experience these aesthetics, you start to appreciate the true beauty of wine.  When it comes to tasting wine, there are a couple important steps to take before you go right for the sip. Before you begin, you need to have a clear (preferably thin) wine glass.  Also, I recommend you start with your white wines and work your way into the reds.


Step 1: The Color

Holding the wine up to a white background, such as a napkin, really helps show you the true colors of the wine.  The colors in wine tells you a lot about the age of the wine.  White wine tends to gain color as it ages and red wine does the opposite.  I’ve noticed that older red wine tends to have a brownish rust tint to it where as a new red wine has rich red color to it.  If a wine is a little more thin and transparent, it usually means that it has a lower alcohol content than the wines that have a thick, creamy look.

Step 2: The Swirl

Whenever you see wine experts swirling their wine, they’re not doing it to be snobby.  They’re doing it for a reason.  Start by swirling your wine in a small circle rotation.  It’s important to do this because when you open a new bottle of wine it needs time to breathe in order to amplify its distinctive aromas.  This also helps release underlying odors in the wine that you might have missed otherwise.   

Step 3: The Smell

After you swirl the wine a couple times, stick as much of your nose in the glass as possible and smell it.  This might sound extreme, but it makes a huge difference.  I like to relate the different aromas of wine to different life experiences.  For example, when I smell Sauvignon Blanc’s from New Zealand, I think about standing on my front porch and smelling the blooming flowers in the spring time.  On the other hand, when I smell Sauvignon Blanc’s from California, I smell a slight tint of fresh cut glass on a dewy, fall morning. 

Step 4: The Taste

The most important part of tasting the wine is the initial taste.  It’s like the first impression, you want to make the best of it.  Make sure you take a bigger sip than usual because you want to swish it around your mouth, like you do with mouthwash. Also, I like to slurp it causing it to bubble in my mouth.  This makes it so the wine scent not only goes deeper into your nasal cavity, but it also helps the wine hit every single one of my taste buds. 

The fun part about wine is that everyone’s pallet is different.  There are no rights and wrongs to the tastes you get out of wine.  It’s all about learning and doing the research to see the different smell and tasting notes that people get out of wine.  It’s a great idea to write down the different aromas and tasting notes when evaluating a wine.  As you start to learn the notes found in each ‘varietal’ of wine, your pallet will become that much more sophisticated and each wine begins to tell its unique story!


Check out the link below to watch a video tutorial of expert sommelier and wine educator Marnie Old on how to taste wine like a professional.

How to professional taste wine

Video found on YouTube by Better Book TV