Wine tasting involves evaluating wine quality, aging potential, commercial value, complexity, and character. Tasting terms describe the look, smell, taste, and feel of wine, including specific flavors such as butter, cherry, coffee, and tobacco.
Wine tasting is an art, a pleasure and for some an occupation. Professional wine tasters make their living evaluating wine quality, aging potential, commercial value, complexity, and character. A refined palate and extensive vocabulary are the tools used to construct a description of wine using specific tasting terms. To the average consumer, these terms may seem like nothing more than indecipherable wine tasting jargon.
When it comes to tasting terms, most of us think of those ambiguous descriptors on the back label of a wine bottle. When selecting a bottle of wine for purchase, we might read this label hoping to decipher some clue that the wine would be to our liking. But we’re often left confused, wondering how a drink can taste “soft,” “marmalade,” or “spicy.” Whether and how a wine mandates these tasting terms may remain a mystery to the general public. There are, however, some tasting terms that can be agreed upon or, at least, accepted.
Perhaps it’s best to start with tasting terms that describe the tasting process and the wine itself, rather than the actual taste of the wine. We’ll get to that later. Some tasting terms describe the act of looking at the wine. Wine tasters “swirl” the wine in the glass, which allows the wine to “air” or “breathe”. This should soften and improve the taste of the wine. Rotation also allows the wine taster to observe the viscosity of the wine. A more viscous wine will slowly creep down the side of the glass, creating “legs” or “tears.”
Afterwards the wine taster will smell the wine. Some wine tasting terms denote the smell of wine, including the terms “nose,” “aroma,” and “bouquet.” Other terms indicate the actual smell of the wine, such as “fruity,” “bright,” “earthy,” and “fresh.” There are more specific tasting terms that indicate an individual smell, called an aroma. Common flavors are indicated using the terms “fresh fruit”, “dried fruit”, “floral”, “vegetable”, “mineral”, “animal”, “buttery”, “spicy”, “hazelnut”, “oak”, and “honey.” Many of these tasting terms can also be used to describe the taste of wine.
Tasting terms used to describe the taste of wine can be classified in a similar way to those used to look at and smell wine. For example, one not only takes a sip, but rather “sips” and “maneuvers” the wine in one’s mouth. Maneuvering the wine refers to moving it all over the tongue, then sucking the air through the wine to get the wine’s flavor to the back of the throat.
When wine is swallowed or spat out, the aftertaste is described by the terms “finish,” which indicates what you taste, and “length,” or how long the taste lasts. The “non-volatile” flavours; salty, sweet, bitter, acidic and savory, it should be “balanced” and appropriate to the style of the wine. The acidity of the wine can be described by the terms “fresh”, “fresh” and “dry”. “Tannin” or “tannic” are tasting terms used to describe the substance that coats the mouth and has a dry, bitter sensation. Other wine tasting terms such as “weight” and “body” also indicate the feel of the wine in your mouth. A wine can be “heavy”, “light bodied”, “medium bodied” or “full bodied”.
Once the characteristics or taste aspects of wine are determined, we come to perhaps the most subjective set of wine tasting terms. These are the specific flavors that the wine taster detects in the wine. Since these words indicate the flavors of other things and don’t just describe the taste of the wine, we can omit the use of the quotes. These flavors include butter, earth, cherry, coffee, blackcurrant, floral, pepper, lemon, pear, grass, orange, vanilla, nut, smoke, spice, and mineral. More unique and, perhaps, less appetizing flavors include bubblegum, eucalyptus, flint, game, gasoline, leather, yeast, tar, tobacco, and cat urine, to name a few.
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