Wine: Expert Guides and Resources

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 tastingKnowing 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.

You drink beverages every day, tasting them as they pass through your mouth. But when it comes to wine, drinking and tasting are not synonymous. Wine is much more complex than other beverages: There’s more going on in a mouthful of wine. For example, most wines have a lot of different (and subtle) flavors, all at the same time, and they give you multiple simultaneous sensations, such as softness and sharpness together.

Once upon a time, wine labels were boring, colorless (literally and in spirit), and the opposite of inviting. Now, many wine labels are fun. They catch your eye, draw you in for a closer look, and maybe make you smile. Although we tend to have classic tastes in wine, we love the variety of wine labels because it makes browsing for wine more enjoyable than ever.

Your inner child will be happy to know that when it comes to wine, it’s okay to like some colors more than others. You can’t get away with saying “I don’t like green food!” much beyond your sixth birthday, but you can express a general preference for white, red, or pink wine for all your adult years. (Not exactly) white wine Whoever coined the term white wine must have been colorblind.

Instead of worrying about crisp wines, earthy wines, and medium-bodied wines, wouldn’t it just be easier to walk into a wine shop and say, “Give me a very good wine for dinner tonight”? Isn’t quality the ultimate issue — or at least, quality within your price range, also known as value?In fact, a good deal of wine marketing revolves around the notion of quality, except in the case of the least expensive wines.

The tastes of a wine reveal themselves sequentially as the tongue detects them and your brain registers them. We recommend that you follow the natural sequence we describe in the next sections when you try to put words to what you’re tasting. Sweetness in wine As soon as you put the wine into your mouth, you can usually notice sweetness or the lack of it.

When describing wine, merchants, restaurant servers, and your oenophile friends will use specific language to tell you about its characteristics. Knowing these words will help you understand the wine they're describing: Aroma or bouquet: The smell of a wine — bouquet applies particularly to the aroma of olde

The language you use to describe a wine starts with your own thoughts as you taste the wine. Thus, the process of tasting a wine and the process of describing it are intertwined.Although wine tasting involves examining wine visually and smelling it as well as tasting it, those first two steps are a breeze compared to the third.