Tasting WineWritten by Admin Admin
Wine Tasting Component I: LookThe first step you have to undertake in wine tasting is visual. 1. Fill up glass up to 1/3 of its volume; never fill it more than half;
| | Tasting WineWritten by admin
Wine Tasting Component I: LookThe first step you have to undertake in wine tasting is visual. 1. Fill up glass up to 1/3 of its volume; never fill it more than half; 2. Hold glass by stem. Initially you may find this too pretentious but there are good reasons for it: а) by doing it this way you can actually observe wine in it; b) this will keep your fingerprints off bowl; в) heat from your palm will not change temperature of wine. There’s a good saying by one of greatest French wine lovers, Emil Painot: Offer someone a glass of wine and you can immediately tell whether he/she is a connoisseur by way they hold glass.” Even though you may not think of yourself as a connoisseur, you could still learn how to hold wine glass. 3. Focus on color intensity and transparency of liquid. a) color of wine, and more specifically its nuances, are best observed on a white background. б) wine’s intensity is best judged by holding glass without slanting it and looking at liquid from above; 4. Next comes swirling of glass. This can also seem too pretentious or even dangerous if you have a full glass or a white top. But this movement is important since it prepares you for next step in wine tasting – Taste. The easiest way to swirl glass is to place it on a table or other even surface, and to swirl your hand while holding glass by stem. Swirl hard and have wine almost touch rim of glass. Then stop. The wine leaves tiny traces with irregular shapes on inside of glass. Some “experts” then read them with as much zeal as coffee-tellers. The truth is however, that they are just an indicator for quality of wine – more alcohol a wine has, more wine traces it forms. What does color of wine tell us? The wine’s color tells us many things about its character. First, color shows grape variety. Let’s take two popular varieties as examples – cabernet sauvignon and pinot noir. Cabernet’s grapes are smaller, with a thicker and darker skin than those of pinot noir. As a result, color of wines made from cabernet sauvignon is usually described as violet to dark while color of wines made from pinot noir is associated with ruby.
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