Good wine tasting technique sounds pretentious, and in practice, the requisite swirling and sniffing and gargling look like silly affectations calculated to draw attention to the taster’s expertise. But the truth is, good tasting technique is essential for anyone who wants to teach himself about wine; and everyone has the natural tools required.
We all learned in high school biology that we have receptors on our tongues that are chemically sensitive to saltiness, sweetness, tartness, and bitterness. Sweetness and tartness are measures of sugar and acidity, which are important components of wine. Bitterness is present in some wines, too, but wine is rarely salty.
Our tongues are also exquisitely sensitive to texture, which helps us measure tannin and extract. Tannins are complex organic compounds found in many wines, that come from the skins, seeds, and stems of the grapes, or from barrels used to age the wine. They leave a drying feeling of astringency in our mouths. Extract is a term that is usually misused: to mean something vaguely akin to “concentration.” In fact, extract is nothing more than a technical term for the sum of everything in wine except water and alcohol that isn’t volatile. Extract includes sugars, acids, minerals, pigments, and glycerol. Alcohol, which is perceived as warmth and “weight,” combines with extract to give the impression of “body” in wine.
The single most difficult obstacle to learning will be the urge to react to an unfamiliar wine with “I like it” or “I don’t like it,” before you’ve made an effort to taste it carefully, without prejudice. Only experience with a wide variety of wines will help you overcome it.
All that said, we need more than our tongues in order to taste wine. We need our noses. And to involve our noses, the first requirement is a good glass. One of the best is the ISO glass, named for the International Standards Organization, which recognizes that the shape and dimension of a glass influence how wine tastes, and recommends a standard glass to ensure that a single wine tastes the same to different tasters, wherever they are. (The ISO, by the way, is the same organization that scientists rely on to define the mass of a gram and the duration of a second!)
I prefer the “Gourmet” tasting glass, made by the Austrian crystal producer Riedel. They’re inexpensive and durable, with a short stem, so they fit nicely in the top rack of a dishwasher – we use them in all of our stores for tasting. But whatever glass you use, it should be of sufficient capacity to hold at least two ounces of wine, without being filled more than a quarter of the way, and the sides of the glass should curve inward toward the opening.