The Wine Lover: Tasting wine, part 1

It’s easy enough to have a glass of wine with dinner or at a party. Most people give the glass a little swirl, maybe look at it for a second questioningly, and then take a sip, because that’s what they see other people do.
Allow me to give you a couple of tips on how to make your wine-tasting experience more enriching and enjoyable.
Before you do anything else, you should look at the color of your wine. Red wine can be anywhere from a light, see-through red to a dark, inky purple. The density of a wine’s color is a huge hint as to whether it is a full-bodied, luscious wine or light-bodied and delicate.
The same rule goes for white wine. White wine can be almost clear, or it can be deep yellow and golden. Just as with red wine, the more color it has, the more body it will probably have.
The main difference between the color of red and white wines is that reds get lighter with age and whites get darker. A red wine might start out dark red, but over 25 years of aging, it will lose a lot of that color. With white wine, it’s the opposite. White wine with 25 years of aging will almost certainly be a deep yellow, if not golden or approaching a tannish brown.
After examining the color, I like to stick my nose in the glass and smell, and then swirl a few times and smell again. Remember, don’t be shy; you can’t smell much if the glass is a foot away from your nose. It’s important to get your nose into the glass so that you can get as much of the aroma as possible.
Sometimes I think the best part of a wine can be its aroma. Oftentimes, smelling the wine will give you a very good sense of what it will be like in the mouth. Usually, when I do a blind tasting, I can figure out what the wine is by the smell more than by the taste. That’s how vital it is.
Each wine has its own distinct characteristics. Riesling will typically have green apples, mineral, slate and petrol in the nose; chardonnay will have vanilla, banana, butter and honey, if it’s from California; zinfandel always smells like blackberry jam to me; pinot noir almost always has cherries or even baked cherries in the nose to some extent, and it can have scents like tar, dry leaves, mushrooms and earth, too.
By learning the different traits of each wine, you can learn to differentiate just by smelling.
Another important reason to smell is to see if a wine is flawed or not. About 5 percent of all wines are “corked.” If a wine is corked, it means it is contaminated with TCA, and it will smell like wet cardboard or newspaper. It is harmless, but very unpleasant. You can also tell if a wine has turned to vinegar or has been stored poorly by smelling it.
In my next column, I will follow up with an examination of how to identify body, sugar content, acidity and tannins when tasting wine. Cheers!
• Austin Twohig is a certified sommelier and partner in The Santa Cruz Experience, which conducts winery tours in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Contact him at au****@th********************.com.