The Look of Wine
In our previous post How to Taste Wine – Preparation, we set the scene for some things to consider before you even pick up the glass.
This week, we move on to the first of the senses we use – Sight
The first thing we look for when picking up the glass is the wines clarity. This is vital. If there is cloudiness, there may be a problem. If its an older wine, it could just be sediment. If not, it could be a problem of re-fermentation or a bacterial problem. If there is a problem, it will be confirmed on the nose and / or the palate.
There are forty shades of green as they say so you can be as creative as you want with the description of the wines colour. You also need to look at the intensity of the wine colour as this tells you a lot too. The best way of looking at the colour is to tilt the glass away from you at a 45 degree angle against a plain white background. This allows you look at the body colour of the wine and the graduation of colour towards and at the rim / edge of the wine.
In general,
Reds get paler with age. The colour of the wine is influenced by the grape variety and how it is made. Reds can range in rim colour from Purple – Ruby – Garnet – Tawny – Brown as they age.
White wines tend to have a broad watery rim. They can have a greenish tinge in youth and can go all the way to a fairly deep yellow. If its a young white wine and it is showing a yellow colour, it may have received some oak treatment.
Thinking back to my WSET studies, we classified the wine colours as follows
Red Wines : Purple – Ruby – Garnet – Tawny
White Wines : Colourless – Lemon Green – Lemon – Gold – Amber – Brown
Rose Wines : Pink – Salmon – Orange
Swirl the wine in the glass and look at how it coats the side of the glass. This produces ‘tears’ or ‘legs’ and gives an indication of alcohol content or residual sugar levels. Sweet / dessert wines can produce an oily effect on the sides of the glass.
Are there bubbles ? Some white wines will have tiny bubbles (petillant) intentionally. This is a little CO2 left in the wine to keep it fresh.
So there you go. Next week we move on to smelling the wine. Some say that this is the most important of all the senses where wine tasting is concerned. Or as the great Gary Vaynerchuk likes to call it – “The Sniffy Sniff”
