Wine Tasting: How to Taste Wine Properly

So – my wife and I started a wine club in the Monterey/Carmel area. It’s called The Tannin Salon. We meet religiously (kind-of) on the third Saturday of every month – there’s about twenty of us. Every meeting we focus on a different variety or region. No matter what the theme is, each meeting is always a lot of fun. It’s an edu-taining of the senses and a great way to engage wine seriously in a relaxed atmosphere.

This morning, I’m learning about my own ability to taste. In particular the spacing of my taste buds. I’m staring into a mirror. I think this is silly. But the author of a How-To-Start-Your-Own-Wine-Club book suggests a drop of blue food coloring on my tongue will help me more precisely assess my potential organoleptic abilities. I think the author is testing my gullibility ratio. Apparently, I score rather high.

I drop the food coloring on my tongue. It’s an instantaneous mess. My entire tongue is now blue. My teeth are blue. My lips too. I am more interested in cleaning up than investigating the spacing of taste buds on my tongue (the dye tastes awful).

When I do get around to examining the spacing of my taste buds – I have rather tightly spaced miniature buds – it is as I expected. According to the author of my dye-debacle, smaller buds are more receptive than larger buds. This is simply due to the number of buds that can fit within the confines of the surface of the tongue. In this regard, I am blessed. But I also have blue tongue.

Tasting wine is more than just the size of your taste buds. It’s about knowing the wine in front of you. That includes, but is not limited to the region it comes from, the vintage, the vineyard practices and yield of fruit per acre/hectare, vinification practices and scores of other qualifiers which may or may not have a bearing on your enjoyment of the actual wine product.