wine tasting

wine tasting, the sampling and evaluation of wines as a means of enhancing the appreciation of them. Once strictly the bailiwick of producers, growers, connoisseurs, and professional tasters, the practice of wine tasting at the consumer level—though generally far less exacting than that performed by wine professionals—has increased with the growing popularity of wine as a beverage and the resulting expansion of wine production throughout the world.

Wine competitions generally rank wines against some standard—the grape variety (e.g., Cabernet Sauvignon), geographic region (e.g., Marlborough, New Zealand), production style (e.g., type of fermentation employed), or artistic attributes, which include such features as complexity, harmony, subtlety, dynamism, development, duration, and uniqueness. The most objective form of tasting is descriptive analysis, which is done with the understanding that any tasting possesses a degree of subjectivity due to differences in taster experience and sensory acuity.

Detailed tastings follow a particular sequence. That involves visual assessment (judging colour, clarity, and opacity), followed by deep smelling (nose in the glass), then tasting (judging initial impression, mid-palate, and finish). Professional tasters typically complete the process by assessing overall quality according to some standard breakdown of points. The more detailed the tasting, the more individual attributes are described as to how they change in character and intensity.

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Even sommeliers may have difficulty consistently detecting the regional or varietal origin of wine. In addition, identifying similar wines, sampled minutes apart, can present a challenge because the differences can be subtle. What training and experience create is a memory bank of features that characterize different groups of wines. Although training and experience improve judging skill, they also modify qualitative judgment. For example, trained tasters are often critical of features that consumers may not detect or may consider of little importance. Thus, an expert opinion can differ considerably from that of most wine consumers.

Frequently, wine flavours are described in terms of fruits, flowers, vegetables, and so forth. Although wines do possess compounds similar to those in such plants, most analogies bear faint resemblance to the real thing, and most wine descriptions reveal more about the taster than about the wine. Some exceptions to that statement are the bell pepper odour of some Cabernet wines and the lychee aspect of some Gewürztraminer wines. Those varietal fragrances are generated by the same compounds that donate the characteristic flavours to the respective fruits.

Because fragrant compounds give wines their most distinctive attributes, they feature prominently in critical tastings. Smell, taste, and mouthfeel aspects are the primary means of assessing overall flavour quality.

Winemakers continue to use descriptive analysis to determine if modifications in grape cultivation or wine production affect a wine’s characteristics and to what degree. The technique may also help determine if geographic regions produce distinctively different wines. Whether such subtle differences are detectable by, or are important to, most consumers is another matter. Nevertheless, descriptive analysis is critical to product development and an unbiased sensory assessment of a wine’s attributes.

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