Wine For Dummies Cheat Sheet
Selecting a wine you like is easy when you know how to taste wine, can use appropriate terms to describe wine, can decode wine names, are happy to approach the selecting process with confidence, and know a little about what wine goes well with what food. This Cheat Sheet is designed to help you do just that!
Quick guide to wine tasting
Knowing how to taste wine not only helps you look like you know what you’re doing — it also helps you enjoy all the aromas and flavors that the winemaker intended. The following four steps simplify the process of wine tasting and help you get the most out of each glass:
- See: Tilt a (no more than half-full!) glass away from you and look at the color of the wine under white light and against a white background, such as a tablecloth, napkin, or piece of paper.
- Smell: Keep your glass on the table and rotate it three or four times using the pads of your fingertips on the base of the stem so that the wine swirls around inside the glass and lets oxygen in. Then, quickly bring the glass to your nose. Stick your nose into the airspace of the glass and smell the wine. Is the aroma fruity, woodsy, fresh, cooked, intense, or mild? Your nose will tire quickly but it recovers quickly, too.
- Sip or Swallow: Take a medium-sized sip of wine. This means more than a few drops but less than a gulp. Hold the wine in your mouth, purse your lips, and draw in some air across your tongue over the wine. Be utterly careful not to choke or dribble, or everyone will strongly suspect that you’re not a wine expert! Swish the wine around in your mouth as if you’re chewing it. Spit or swallow depending on your purpose.
- Speculate: After you go through all this rigmarole, it’s time to reach a conclusion: Do you like what you tasted? The possible answers are yes, no, an indifferent shrug of the shoulders, or “I’m not sure, let me take another taste,” which means that you have serious wine-nerd potential.
Useful terms for describing wine
When describing wine, wine merchants, service staff, and your enophile (meaning a connoisseur of wine) friends will use specific language to tell you about its characteristics. Knowing these words helps you understand the wine they’re describing:
- Aroma: The smell of a wine.
- Body: The apparent weight of a wine in your mouth (light, medium, or full).
- Crisp: A wine with refreshing acidity.
- Dry: A wine that creates a parched feeling at the back of your throat.
- Finish: The impression a wine leaves as you swallow it, and in the moments after.
- Flavor intensity: How strong or weak a wine’s flavors are.
- Fruity: A wine whose aromas and flavors suggest fruit. Fruitiness doesn’t imply sweetness.
- Oaky: A wine that has oak flavors (smoky, toasty, roasted).
- Soft: A wine that has a smooth rather than crisp mouthfeel.
- Tannic: A red wine that leaves the mouth feeling dry.
Easy wine identifier
Most wines you find in shops and restaurants are named in two basic ways: for the variety of the grape or for the place the grapes are grown. This guide decodes common wine names and tells you the wine’s color.
Buying wine with confidence
Don’t get frazzled when you’re shopping for wine. Browsing and buying wine should be a fun, positive experience. Remember these helpful hints when you hit the wine shop:
- No one in the world knows everything about wine.
- Smart people aren’t afraid to ask “dumb” questions.
- The purpose of wine is to be enjoyed.
- Expensive doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll enjoy it more.
- I am my own best judge of wine quality.
- Most wines are good wines.
- Experimentation is fun.
- Advice is free for the asking.
- Every bottle of wine is a live performance.
- I’ll never know until I try it!
Tried and true food and wine pairings
At the end of the day, we want you to drink what you like and eat what you like. There are, however, a few tried and true pairings from around the world — marriages of food and wine so divine that their pairing is a must at some point in your life.
Some pairings are congruent, meaning the aromas and flavors in the wine closely match the aromas and flavors in the food. Other pairings are contrasting, meaning that the wine and the food are driven by different aromas and flavors but their union ignites a magical thirst or hunger for more.
Here are some of our favorite everyday and fancy pairings.
