Wine Tasting In Six Steps

Taste wine like a professional. In O'Brien's we have a simple system. We call it the six S's. See, swirl, sniff, sip, slurp and spit. By the end of this session I'll have taught you all about those six S's and you'll have more confidence and more understanding about how to approach your glass of wine and how to get more from that glass of wine. The first of the six S's is see. See the wine in the glass. It should be clear and it should be bright and if you want to double check colour the perfect thing to do is hold it against a white sheet of paper. You can see the gradation of the colour. You can see that this is a very pale straw colour and you can also confirm as you saw that it was clear and bright. With a red wine you may see more against a white paper but you can again as I say see colour gradation. You can see depth. Can you see through the wine or is it completely opaque? So the colour starts to tell you about maybe the style of the wine. Perhaps as a general rule with red you could say that the darker the colour then the richer and more powerful the wine is going to be. Not necessarily always the case but the colour starts to give a hint of the wine. Deeper richer whites could mean that the wine is going to be sweeter or it could mean that the wine is older. So it's worth looking at the colour and looking at the clarity and just looking and having you enjoy the sensation of the colour of your wine. When you're assessing a wine this is a perfect amount to pour in the glass. It allows you to see the colour as we mentioned earlier but it also allows you to agitate the wine. This bowl here keeps the wine at the bottom of the glass and then this tapering allows the aromas to be released but gently so that you can still nose them. So the swirl is very gently hold the wine by the stem. You're not warming the wine by holding it by the bowl and just give it a gentle swirl allowing the oxygen to release aromas in the wine for the next step. Smell. You've agitated the wine get your nose into the glass and again and again. You really have to get your nose into the glass and two or three good strong smells to start to understand the aromas the wine is releasing. That's one of the most important stages in wine tasting and your nose tires quite quickly so it's better to take two or three or three or four really good sniffs to assess the aromas of the wine because otherwise if you take say six or eight short sniffs you won't be able to smell as much and your nose will tire more quickly. When you're smelling the wine just concentrate on what the wine is saying to you. You don't need to worry too much about vocabulary. You don't need to worry oh that does remind me of something but don't be too stressed about what it reminds you of. Just let the wine talk to you. There's no right and there's no wrong and at the end of the day again enjoy the sensation. Enjoy those aromas and now we're going to sip the wine. Take a good mouthful into your mouth and coat your gums, your tongue, your cheeks. Allow that wine to fully go all around the surface of your mouth covering the whole palate. Your taste buds are at different parts of your tongue so it's important in order for you to be able to understand the flavours in the wine that you take a decent mouthful and that you allow it to swirl all around your palate. Now the slurp. Sounds disgusting but you're among friends and it really makes a major difference to how you can taste the wine. Similar to how the oxygen allows the aromas to be released when you agitate the glass or when you swirl the glass then when you take some oxygen through your teeth onto the surface of the wine it releases a lot more flavour. I'm going to show you. And the final stage of the success is the spit. You don't have to do that with the whole bottle but as professional tasters we would always spit wine when we're tasting. Keeps the palate much much fresher. So you've agitated, you've sipped and you're now going to spit and then think about it. Think about those flavours. How long do they last? What's the intensity? What's the aftertaste? And that's another key factor for spitting because you can assess those flavours and the aftertaste and the length of the wine much more carefully when you've actually spat the wine. So a recap of the successes. See, swirl, sniff, sip, slurp and spit.