The beauty of life is in fine things. While our daily lives are uneventful and routine, we must look for opportunities to cherish the essence of life through the things we enjoy. While some enjoy dance, music, or the arts, there are some who find their passion through the land of condiments. Food and drink are both the life-givers and the essence of true pleasure in life. We have more than a million cuisines and even more different ways to cook them, each endemic to the person cooking it. And while we could explore all these cuisines, we know you are looking for something a little more difficult. And for that, we present to you the first steps to become a professional at fine dining: wine tasting.
Getting A Hang of The Different Wines
In its essence, wine is simply crushed grapes, fermented and sweetened, or soured to be served as a drink along with the choicest foods. Different ones taste different due to the way they have been prepared, the essences they’ve been infused with and whatnot. And today, you will be learning how to develop your taste buds into tasting and judging different wines accurately. Wine tasting helps you pair different ones perfectly with the kind of cuisine you want to have. Like a chilled beer goes well with a Chinese takeaway, and a port red goes well with spaghetti and meatballs.
Anybody, who’s paying attention, can get the grasp of wine tasting within a minimum of four hours. However, it can take close to a year to get the ability down to pat. However, you needn’t worry, we have some foolproof cheat codes to get a hang of all the different wines within four hours.
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There Are Nine Steps And Maintaining The Sequence Is Important
There are nine foolproof steps to take, for you to get good at tasting and detecting the different kind of wines out there. There are a lot of different methods to approach it and there not necessarily be just nine steps. You can employ those different steps but this works too. Develop your palate. Just like your vocabulary is of an amateur until you start reading, you are not a sommelier till you start drinking wine. Your wine palate will only develop as you go along. However, it does become easier as you go along. Your taste buds get better at tasting and you start smelling infusions more easily.
Now, do not think that everyone takes to wine easily. It is definitely an acquired taste. You need to start from the basics and then progress to the more complicated ones. Start with the one you have. Let it be a simple rose or a red. You can start with sweet zinfandel or a savoury cabernet franc. Take the time to swish the wine around your mouth, to get a mouthfeel and taste for it. Don’t swallow it immediately. As you taste more of them, you will get past the basic taste of wine and more into the subtleties of the taste. That’s when the actual wine tasting begins.
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Try A Variety You Haven’t Before
Till now, you have been trying wine that you recognize, simply to get a taste of the typical wine flavor. After becoming adept at detecting the subtleties of the drink, you can move on to tasting the wines you haven’t yet. This kind of wine will be your ‘Aha!’ wine. Basically, it will be the kind of wine which will introduce you the true versatility that exists in the different wine types.
If you don’t know this, a sauvignon blanc is a variety of white wine. However, it isn’t always sweet. A sauvignon blanc from New Zealand has hints of bell pepper and jalapeno. These kind of aha wines break your preconceived notions you develop about wine. The Aha wine needs to be something you have never tried before.
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Read a Wine Book
A common problem most beginner wine testers face is burnout. In a quest to find their aha wine, they end up tasting numerous wines, never really letting one settle onto their tongue. Their perceptions of a certain wine may be entirely different from another sommelier.
However, that doesn’t mean you are wrong. But to reach an equal footing, you need to reach that level of expertise too. And the best way to get such a theoretical lesson is through a book. You could read the World Atlas of Wine for about thirty dollars. Despite being a little on the expensive side, it will turn out to be an investment if you do take to it passionately.
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Drink Bold Ones
To truly experience the fun of wine tasting, you need to venture out from the basic muted sweet wines and into the tableau of other ones waiting your perusal. Wines have multitudes of flavours, and you must try the boldest of them to get a feel for all the bounds of different ones. Some of the best and boldest you can consumed are –
- Syrah / Shiraz
- Malbec
- Petite Sirah
- Mourvedre / Monastrell
- Touriga Nacional
- Cabernet Sauvignon
- Petit Verdot
My personal favourite is the Petit verdot. Petite, as you may have an idea is French for small and the verdot refers to a specific species of grape used to make this. Highly concentrated, the verdot is extremely dry. However, it has an abundance of flavor and is basically an explosion in your mouth. It is almost blue-black in colour and popularly comes under the red ones.
You can read up about each one you consume and examine or compare each one. Every taster’s experience is different, and the tastes somebody else describes tasting may not stand same for you. So, as you taste, you could make a note for the experience you have with the different wines. Do not settle for a best, though you will most naturally incline towards a certain type of wine more. Every one has its own unique quality, and the beauty of it is in enjoying each and everyone. And if you are really getting into tasting a multitude at once, make sure you have a cheese board to break up the tastes once in a while. Happy tasting!!