How to Taste Wine and Develop Your Palate

Learn how to taste wine with 4 basic steps.

Sommeliers practice the following wine-tasting tips to refine their palates and sharpen their ability
to recall wines. Even though pros use this method, it’s quite simple to understand and can help
anyone improve their wine palate.

Anyone can taste wine. All you need is a glass of wine and your brain. There are 4 steps to wine
tasting:
1. Look: A visual inspection of the wine under neutral lighting
2. Smell: Identify aromas through orthonasal olfaction (e.g. breathing through your nose)
3. Taste: Assess both the taste structure (sour, bitter, sweet) and flavours derived from
retronasal olfaction (e.g. breathing with the back of your nose)
4. Think/Conclude: Develop a complete profile of a wine that can be stored in your long-term
memory.

How to Taste Wine

1. Look
Check out the colour, opacity, and viscosity (wine legs). You don’t need to spend more than 5
seconds on this step. A lot of clues about a wine are buried in its appearance, but unless you taste
blind, you will find most of the answers on the bottle (i.e. the vintage, ABV and grape variety).

2. Smell
When you first start smelling wine, think big to small. Are there fruits? Think of broad categories
first, i.e. citrus, orchard, or tropical fruits in whites or, when tasting reds, red fruits, blue fruits, or
black fruits. Broadly, you can divide the nose of a wine into three primary categories:
 Primary Aromas are grape-derivative and include fruits, herbs, and floral notes.
 Secondary Aromas come from winemaking practices. The most common aromas are yeast-
derivative and easy to spot in white wines: cheese rind, nut husk (almond, peanut), or stale
beer.
  Tertiary Aromas come from ageing, usually in a bottle or possibly in oak. These aromas
are mostly savoury: roasted nuts, baking spices, vanilla, autumn leaves, old tobacco, cured
leather, cedar, and even coconut.

3. Taste
Taste is how we use our tongues to observe the wine, but, once you swallow the wine, the aromas
may change because you’re receiving them retro-nasally.
 Taste: Our tongues can detect salty, sour, sweet, or bitter. All wines are going to have some
sour, because grapes all inherently have some acid. This varies with climate and grape type.
Some varieties are known for their bitterness (i.e. Pinot Grigio), which manifests as a sort of
light, pleasant tonic-water-type flavour. Some white table wines retain a small portion of
their grape sugars, which adds natural sweetness. You can’t ever smell sweetness, only your
tongue can detect it. Lastly, very few wines have a salty quality, but in some rare instances,
salty reds and whites exist.
 Texture: Your tongue can “touch” the wine and perceive its texture. Texture in wine is
related to a few factors, but an increase in texture almost always happens in a higher-
alcohol, riper wine. Ethanol gives a wine texture because we perceive it as “richer” than
water. We also can detect tannins with our tongue, which are a sand-paper or tongue-
depressor drying sensation in red wines.
 Length: The taste of wine is also time-based, with a beginning, middle (mid-palate) and end
(finish).

4. Think
Did the wine taste balanced or out of balance (i.e. too acidic, too alcoholic, too tannic)? Did
you like the wine? Was this wine unique or unmemorable? Were there any characteristics
that shined through and impressed you?

Step 1: Look

How to Judge the Look of a Wine: The colour and opacity of wine can give you hints as to the
approximate age, the potential grape varieties, the amount of acidity, alcohol, sugar, and even the
potential climate (warm vs. cool) where the wine was grown.
Age: As white wines age, they tend to change colour, becoming more yellow and brown, with an
increase in overall pigment. Red wines tend to lose colour, becoming more transparent as time
passes.
Potential Grape Varieties: Here are some common hints you can look for in the colour and rim
variation
 Nebbiolo and Grenache-based wines often have a translucent garnet or orange colour on
their rim, even in their youth.
 Pinot Noir will often have a true-red or true-ruby colour, especially in cooler climates.
 Malbec will often have a magenta-pink rim.
Alcohol and Sugar: Wine legs can tell us if the wine has high or low alcohol and/or high or low
sugar. The thicker and more viscous are the legs, likely the more alcohol or residual sugar contained
in the wine.

Step 2: Smell

How to Judge the Smell of Wine: Aromas in wine nearly give away everything about a wine, from
grape variety, whether or not the wine was oak-aged, where the wine is from, and how old the wine
is. A trained nose and palate can pick all these details out.

Where Do Wine Aromas Come From?

Aromas like “sweet Meyer lemon” and “pie crust” are aroma compounds called stereoisomers that
are captured in our noses from evaporating alcohol. A single glass can have hundreds of different
compounds, which is why people smell so many different things. It’s also easy to get lost in
language, though, since we all interpret individual aromas in related, slightly different ways. Your
“sweet Meyer lemon” may be my “tangerine juice”. We’re both talking about a sweet citrus quality
in the wine, and we’re both correct–we’re just using slightly different words to express the idea.

Wine Aromas Fall into 3 Categories:

 Primary Aromas: Primary aromas come from the type of grape and the climate where it
grows. For instance, Barbera will often smell of liquorice or anise, due to the compounds in
Barbera grapes themselves.
Generally speaking, the fruit flavours in wine are primary aromas.
  Secondary Aromas: Secondary aromas come from the fermentation process (the yeast). A
great example is the “sourdough” smell that you can find in Brut Champagne, that is
sometimes described as “bready” or “yeasty.” Yeast aromas can also smell like old beer or
cheese rind. Another typical secondary aroma would be the yoghurt or sour cream aroma
that comes from malolactic fermentation.
 Tertiary Aromas: Tertiary aromas (called “bouquets”) come from ageing wine. Ageing
aromas are attributed to oxidation, ageing in oak or in bottles over some time. The most
common example of this is the “vanilla” aroma associated with wines aged in oak. Other
examples of tertiary aromas are the nutty flavours in aged vintage Champagne. Tertiary
aromas often modify primary aromas, with the fresh fruit of a youthful wine changing to be
more dried and concentrated as it develops.

Step 3: Taste

How to Judge the Taste of Wine: With practice, you could blind taste a wine down to the style,
region and even vintage! Here are the details on what to pay attention to.
Sweetness:
When you taste a wine, the best way to sense sweetness is on the front of your tongue. Wines range
from 0 grams per litre of residual sugar (g/l RS) to about 220 g/l RS. By the way, 220 will have a
consistency close to syrup!
 Dry Wines Most people would draw the line for dry wines at around 10 g/l of residual
sugar, but the human threshold of perception is only 4g/l. Most Brut Champagne will have
about 6-9 gl/. Your average harmoniously sweet German Riesling has about 30 or 40 g/l.
 Acidity Matters Wines with high acidity taste less sweet than wines with low acidity
because we generally perceive the relationship between sweetness and acidity, not the
individual parts.

Acidity Refers to pH: There are many types of acids in wine, but the overall acidity in wine is
often measured in pH. Acidity is how sour a wine tastes. You generally perceive acidity as that
mouthwatering, puckering sensation in the back of your jaw. High-acid wines are frequently
described as “tart” or “zippy”. pH in wine ranges from 2.6, which is punishingly acidic, to about
4.9, barely detectable as tart, because it’s much closer to the neutral 7.0 measurement.
 Most wines range between 3 and 4 pH.
 Highly acidic wines are more tart and mouthwatering.
 High acidity can help you determine if a wine is from a cooler climate region or if the wine
grapes were picked early.
 Low acid wines taste smoother and creamier, with less mouthwatering qualities.
 Super low acid wines will taste flat or flabby.

Tannin:
Tannin is a red wine characteristic and it can tell us the type of grape, if the wine was aged in oak,
and how long the wine could age. You perceive tannin only on your palate and only with red wines.
Tannin comes from 2 places: the skins and seeds of grapes or from oak aging. Every grape variety
has a different inherent level of tannin, depending on its individual character. For example, Pinot
Noir and Gamay have inherently low-levels of tannin, whereas Nebbiolo and Cabernet have very
high levels.
 Grape Tannins Tannin from grape skins and seeds is typically more abrasive and can taste
more green.
 Oak Tannins Tannin from oak will often taste more smooth and round. They typically hit
your palate in the center of your tongue.

Alcohol:
Alcohol can sometimes tell us the intensity of a wine and the ripeness of the grapes that went into
making the wine.
 Alcohol level can add quite a bit of body and texture to the wine.
 Alcohol ranges from 5% ABV – 16% ABV. A sub-11% ABV table wine usually means
something with a bit of natural sweetness. Dry wines at 13.5% to 16% ABV will all be rich
and intensely flavoured. Fortified wines are 17-21% ABV.
 Alcohol level is directly correlated to the sweetness of the grapes before fermenting the
wine. For this reason, lower ABV (sub-11%) wines will often have natural sweetness;
  Warmer growing regions produce riper grapes, which have the potential to make higher
alcohol wines.

Body:
Body can give us clues to the type of wine, the region in which it was grown, and the possible use
of oak ageing. When you swish the wine in your mouth, does it feel like skim, 2%, or whole milk?
That texture will roughly correspond with light, medium, and full body in wine. Usually, body is
related to alcohol, but various other processes like lees stirring, malolactic fermentation, oak ageing,
and residual sugar can all give a wine additional body and texture.

Step 4: Conclusion

This is your opportunity to sum up a wine. What was the overall profile of the wine? Fresh fruits
with an acid-driven finish? Jammy fruits with oak and a broad, rich texture?
In a scenario when you are blind tasting a wine, you would use this moment to attempt to guess
what the wine it is that you’re tasting. Try it to hone your skills!