Wine Assessment is not reserved for the wine professional nor is it the exclusive realm of wine experts. Wine Assessment is in fact a quickly learned tool that has significant practical application for any and all wine drinkers. The simple practice of these three simple steps to wine tasting will allow you to enjoy your wines more and help you to find more wines that you enjoy. In the process, you may just become a little bit of a wine snob but hopefully in a fun way. Remember, no matter who you are and how little or how much experience you have at tasting or drinking wines, practice makes better! Now lets delve into the the three steps to wine tasting and assessment.

Step One - Sight assessment is the first stage of wine tasting and assessment. Not surprisingly it is also the first step in our approach to food and choosing a romantic interest. It has been truly said, that we consume first with our eyes. The importance of aesthetic appeal is as important in winetasting as it is in other areas of our lives and perhaps even more so because it gives us clues to the soundness of a wine. The Clarity and color of a wine potentially tells us about the winemaking practices, its grape variety and origin, storage and age. Some of this can come in blind tastings. Now there are some wines in which color and clarity will tell us less but for premium single or primary variety wines, it will reveal quite a bit. So what are we looking for exactly? For white wines it is shades of barely yellow (some call it lemon and other hay) to deep golden. Some may have browning edges if purposely oxidized or purposely so. Red wines range from a translucent bright red to inky purple with most landing in the ruby range. Certain varieties of red show blue or purple hues and others are classically garnet red. Rose wines range from pinkish salmon to deep rose colors, reflecting origin, winemaking process, grape varieties and age. Fortified wines also run the gamut though fortified white wines tend to have shades of amber and some red have brownish or tawny hues due to the oxidative aging process. The idea with sight is to notice and record what you see along these lines. Is it clear or cloudy, Is that clarity particularly brilliant? Is is ruby with tawny edges? Is the meniscus watery or a clear even gradient. Is it light lemon, medium or deep? Golden? Browning? Is it salmon pink or vibrant rose? Perhaps a bronze salmon? Whatever you see, just note it. After a while, you'll build up a memory of what is typical and not and this can be used to gauge the correctness of wine of that type in the future. Mainly though, this exercise forces you to focus upon the aesthetic attributes of a wine and visuals are usually a pleasurable experience overlooked in wine tasting.

The second assessment has to do with smell or what is referred to as aroma nd bouquet. To do this you just smell the wine but there is a correct way to get the full experience of this crucial step. The aroma of a wine can reveal defects that may ward you off from putting some putrid liquid in your mouth, trust your nose! If it don't smell right, it ain't going to taste right either. This step is pretty simple. First, without swirling it, put you nose within an inch of the glass and take alternating short deep sniffs and steady normal ones. Tilt you head to expose one nostril more than the other repeats the sniffing - breathing in thing. Your sinuses are not created equal. Note what you smell and the intensity of it. Was it light, moderate or effusive (intense) and what did you smell in common vernacular. Apples, oranges, lemon, lime, grapefruit, passion fruit, pineapple, raspberries, cherries, blackberries or blackcurrants?, smoky meats, char, spice, cinnamon or black pepper, florals? white blossoms, acacia, honeysuckle, peony, iris, violets, grandmas stinky perfume? whatever it reminds you off write it down. There are no wrong answers, the perception of smell is a very personal matter, objective, subjective and guided by our experiences and relative exposure. The task is to just be thorough and give an opinion on its intensity or generosity and summarize if this is a positive or negative combination of scents.  

The third step is the taste, which is the sum of the tactile impressions and the flavor (largely smell) of a wine. This is largely a repeat of smell except for the tactile part which includes the assessment of acidity, tannins (mainly for reds), body (texture), alcohol content, sweetness (dry being the opposite) and Umami, which is the savory element of taste like that encountered in eating a steak or sauteed mushroom or soy sauce. So, to do this you take about one ounce into your mouth, breath in a little air without dribbling, moving it around your mouth gently with you tongue (yes keep breathing) and finally swallowing, which at the end of, you exhale lightly through your nostrils (yes, ensure you have swallowed all that wine, so you don't look like a gross version of Niagara Falls). Swallowing produces the aftertaste or finish part of the assessment and exhaling engages the retronasal cavity, action, since 80-90% of taste is actually smell. Record all you taste in flavor elements including intensity and yes, this can vary a little from the smell assessment. Assess the acidity levels, tannin levels and smoothness, body which is closely tied to the alcohol level (abv), sweetness or dryness and Umami effect, if present. Record all you observations. The balance of the flavor components of the wine and its structural elements like acidity and tannins, its intensity of flavor, the complexity of flavors and its length of finish is what constitutes a wines excellence of taste. Again no right or wrong per se because we are all made with different thresholds of perception in these assessment categories but there is a range of acceptability that most of us will recognize in a wine of quality and one that is flawed. The challenge is to recognize the difference between personal preference (I only like big bold reds or elegant European reds) and objective positive characteristics for a variety and origin. Just keep in mind that "typicity" or "terroir" purity is not the same as quality, it is merely reflective of what the norm in and ultimately, quality is about the wine as it is not how you thought it should have been for its origin or type. This does not mean that a good Chardonnay will taste like a Riesling or Pinot Noir, that's a strawman argument. We are normally talking about too much new oak in a Puligny Montrachet, too much body in a Pinot Noir or too much butter on that Napa Chardonnay and other such things. It is possible to assess a wine as good and yet not be you thing but a poorly made or poorly balanced wine will be recognized more universally as such. 

A wines quality assessment is the sum of the three parts with weight generally given by most tasters to the taste, which by default association also includes the aroma or smell. Color and clarity plays a minor part in our overall assessment of a wines quality and frankly, in our ultimate enjoyment.

You can choose to assign a score for each segment, weighted for importance. You can use a numerical grading system, letters, stars, puffs or whatever you wish as long as it is meaningful to you and others in you tasting group. It merely gives a relative and historical reference guide for the immediate and possibly the future reference benefit when comparing new wines to your benchmarks. 

Sure, there is more to tasting professionally but now you have the gist of it and are on your way with a little bit of focused practice.

Cheers!