How to Taste

Everyone tastes. Most people just have not learned to listen. The professional at the end of the bar who can name the grape, guess the region, and tell you the wine will be better in five years is not working with better equipment than you. They are working with a method and a vocabulary, and they have repeated both enough times that it looks like instinct.

The goal here is not to sound smart. It is to know what is in your glass and say it plainly. "Nice" tells no one anything. "High acid, light body, lime and wet stone, long finish" tells everyone at the table what you tasted, and it tells you what to buy next time.

Five steps, always in this order. The Tasting Sheet, Flight of Four is laid out top to bottom in the same sequence, so once you have done it a few times the sheet does the remembering for you.

See. Tilt the glass against something white. Judge depth first: pale, medium, or deep. Then pick the color word. Whites run straw, lemon, gold, and toward amber with age. Reds run purple, ruby, garnet, and toward tawny with age. One warning that will save you a lot of wrong calls later: pale does not mean light. Some of the firmest, grippiest reds in the world are pale in the glass.

Nose. Short sniffs, not one long inhale. First name the level: low, medium, or pronounced. Then ask where the smells come from (the three sources, called tiers, are explained below). Does it smell mostly of the grape (fruit, flowers, herbs, stone), of the winemaking (toast, butter, bread dough), or of age (dried fruit, leather, honey, nuts)? Then pick three descriptors from the Descriptors Sheet. Do not judge yet. You are collecting evidence.

Palate. Six scales, one word each. Sweetness: dry (meaning not sweet), off-dry (a touch of sweetness), sweet. Acidity: low, medium, high. Tannin: low, medium, high. Alcohol: low, medium, high. Body: light, medium, full. Finish: short, medium, long.

Here is how to feel each one. Acid makes your mouth water after you swallow. Tannin grips your gums and the front of your tongue, the way strong black tea does. Alcohol is warmth at the back of the throat. Body is weight, and the easiest comparison is milk: skim, whole, cream. And the finish is how long the flavor lingers after you swallow. Count it out loud. Under ten seconds is short. Ten to thirty is medium. Past thirty is long, and length is one of the most reliable signs of quality you can measure without knowing anything else.

BLIC. The four-point quality score, explained below.

Call. Commit to a grape and a region before anyone tells you the answer. Write it down. Wrong is fine. Vague is not. The call is where the learning happens, because a wrong call with a reason teaches you more than a right guess without one.

Once you have described the wine, score it. Four questions, each worth zero, a half, or one point.

Balance. Do the acid, fruit, tannin, alcohol, and oak sit together, or does one of them stick out? Nothing sticking out is a full point.

Length. The finish you just counted. Short is zero. Medium is a half. Long is one.

Intensity. How much flavor is on the palate? Faint is zero. Clear is a half. Pronounced is one.

Complexity. How many distinct things can you name? One or two is zero. Three or four is a half. Five or more, across more than one tier, is one.

Add them up. Up to one is acceptable. One and a half to two is good. Two and a half to three is very good. Three and a half or four is outstanding. The score is not about whether you liked the wine. Plenty of outstanding wines are not to my taste. It is about whether the wine is well made, and that is a judgment you can defend.

Every aroma in a glass of wine comes from one of three places, and knowing which one tells you a lot before you have even guessed the grape.

Primary aromas come from the grape itself: fruit, flowers, herbs, and the mineral notes some sites give. A young Sauvignon Blanc is almost entirely primary.

Secondary aromas come from the winemaking: vanilla, toast, and smoke from oak, butter and cream from malolactic conversion (a step after fermentation that softens the wine's acid), bread dough and brioche from lees (the spent yeast a wine can rest on), banana and bubblegum from carbonic maceration (fermenting whole, uncrushed grapes, the Beaujolais method).

Tertiary aromas come from time: dried fruit, leather, tobacco, and forest floor in old reds; honey, nuts, and, in old Riesling, petrol.

If a wine is all primary, it is probably young and made to be drunk now. If secondary notes lead, someone made a deliberate style choice in the cellar. If tertiary notes lead, the wine has age on it, and you should be thinking about how gracefully.

Sometimes a wine is not off-style. It is broken. Learn six smells and say so before you score, because a faulty wine will fail every scale and teach you nothing.

TCA, the classic "corked" wine, smells of wet cardboard and a musty cellar. Brettanomyces smells of barnyard, band-aid, and horse; a little is a style in some regions, a lot is a fault. Volatile acidity smells of nail polish remover and vinegar. Oxidation smells of bruised apple and sherry, and the color will look flat and brown for its age. Reduction smells of struck match, rubber, or egg, and often blows off with air. Heat or light damage smells cooked and stewed, and in whites, of wet wool.

Four wines: a light white, a full white, a light red, and a full red, so every scale on the sheet means something on day one. Pour them open, no bags, labels showing. You are learning the method, not guessing.

1. Sauvignon Blanc, Marlborough. Pronounced aromatics, high acid, no oak. Passion fruit, grapefruit, cut grass. Swap: any Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc under $20.
2. Chardonnay, Sonoma or Napa, barrel-fermented. Full body, obvious oak, butter from malolactic. Swap: a Russian River Chardonnay under $30.
3. Pinot Noir, Willamette Valley. Pale, low tannin, high acid, red cherry and earth. Swap: a Bourgogne Rouge.
4. Shiraz, Barossa Valley. Deep color, big but soft tannin, high alcohol, ripe blackberry and smoke. Swap: a McLaren Vale Shiraz.

Work each column of the sheet top to bottom. Talk after every wine. When you get to wine 4, go back and taste wine 1 again. The distance between them is the whole vocabulary you just learned.

The goal is not to sound smart. The goal is to understand what is in your glass.

Next: The Red Grapes. Ten grapes, one map, and the first time you taste with the bottles in bags.