THE CORRECT WAY TO TASTE WINE

We hope you enjoyed the first article and that you are now looking forward to enhancing your wine drinking experiences. The information I am about to share with you is the same info that was shared with me in 1992 when I managed “La Tour Des Vins”, a premium wine shop in St. Emilion. Up until meeting my mentor, Laurent Daucy, I considered myself a pretty accomplished wine drinker; after all, I had even produced my own homemade wine! I recall one night in particular when a good friend of mine, Chuck, drank two pint glasses of a wine that was still fermenting, on top of a few pints of Guinness! He ended up sitting in a rocking chair playing guitar and blasting out a version of a Johnny Cash song. Now, Chuck, who is really quite timid, had never sang or played guitar before that night, and please God, never will again. Two days later Chuck eventually surfaced and vowed never to drink wine again. I vowed to stay well out of his mother’s way.


Before meeting Laurent Daucy I could never understand how, nor why, people could get so excited over a bottle of wine. In those days it represented no more than an alcohol fix for me, and was well down the line with Guinness being my preferred beverage. Laurent is a sommelier, (wine taster) and is incredibly passionate about his trade. His first day in the wine shop he gave me a wine appreciation class that forever changed my wine drinking, it was so simple and yet so effective.

We use three of our senses when tasting wine; they are, Visual, Nasal and Gustative, the most effective by far being nasal, especially retro-nasal. On the tongue we possess only four tasters, Salt, Sour, Bitter and Sweet. However, nasally we can recognise up to four thousand aromas; this is why the experts say that our sense of smell is one thousand times more important than our sense of taste.

For the following experience all you need is a bottle of wine and a proper wine glass. The glass should be tulip shaped to hold the aromas within, and should also be odour free, as existing odours will distort the tasting. A very effective way to clean your glass is to wash it out with a little wine.  For best results use a “vin de terroir” as opposed to an industrial wine. To really recognise the difference proper tasting makes, fill your glass one third full and do the following.

·          Start by tasting as you normally would.  

·          Second time around, swivel the wine in your glass before putting your nose in the glass and smelling the wine. Now, take a mouthful, this time holding it in your mouth for ten seconds or more and chew on it as you would a piece of bread. When you eventually swallow the wine keep your mouth closed for another ten seconds or more, exhaling through your nose. Do you notice a difference? A big difference? By chewing the wine in this manner you actually taste the wine retro-nasally; whistling backwards at the same time will further enhance the experience

When you taste in this manner you will begin to identify the different aromas present in the wine, you will also notice that the aftertaste lingers on the palate. Our customers tell us that by drinking in the described manner, they derive a lot more pleasure from their wine drinking, and also, a bottle of wine lasts them much longer.

Next month we will drill down a little deeper to help you understand and analyse wines, and we will also cover some of the terminology used to describe wines.

Today I am sitting here looking out my front window at the vineyards of St. Emilion and tomorrow I am heading to the Loire Valley, and then onto the Champagne region, for a week of wine tasting, tough life I know but someone has to do it!

Cheers for now!

 

  

Paddy O' Flynn, founder of the Wine Buff , has been resident in St. Emilion, the heart of the Bordeaux wine-producing region, for the last fifteen years. A former manager of 'La Tour des Vins', one of the premier wine-shops in St. Emilion, he is perfectly located to report direct from the vineyards.

Rene Baylet, Paddy's father-in-law, is a former recipient of the prestigious award, best wine-producer in France regarding quality/price. Rene's son, and Paddy’s brother-in-law, Richard, is the proprietor of five mobile wine-bottling plants, keeping him in daily contact with the lesser known, smaller producers who manage to produce some of Frances’ top wines.

 

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