Wine-tasting 101: the four factors

Wine tasting is fun for any of a variety of reasons, but it becomes even more enjoyable when you are able to distinguish one wine from the next and speak about them with some intelligence.
This means that you have to pay attention when sipping your wine. It also means that you will have a much more rich experience, and you will be able to better tell which wines are for you and which wines aren’t.
There are four concepts you need to learn to begin: body, residual sugar, acidity and tannin. These four factors will help you definitively differentiate wines and learn what to expect from different grapes and different regions.
Have you ever heard someone call a wine “huge?” Have you ever drunk a wine that went down like water? These are both characteristics of body. The best way to think of body is to compare it to milk. We have all had half-and-half, whole milk and nonfat milk.
If a wine feels like half-and-half in your mouth, then it is very full-bodied. It will feel like it is coating your mouth. If it is like nonfat milk, it is very light-bodied and doesn’t take over your mouth at all.
Residual sugar is a little more difficult to determine than body, because it can easily be mistaken for wood in white wines and lots of fruit flavors in red wines. A wine is usually categorized either as dry, off-dry, semi-sweet or sweet.
It is easy to tell a semi-sweet or sweet wine, because the sugar is so blatantly apparent. However, dry and off-dry might be a little more difficult. One good trick is to see how your tongue feels after swallowing the wine. If it feels coated at all, then the wine has some sugar. Another good thing to remember is that most wines are almost completely dry.
Acidity is the most difficult of the characteristics to pick up on. It can be like tartness, and it can make your mouth pucker. A high-acid wine is like stiletto shoes walking on ice inside your mouth. Acidity can be electric with its intensity.
But acidity is a very important component in every glass of wine. I can’t stress that enough. It is a major player in every wine’s balance and complexity.
The best way to tell acidity: It makes your mouth water after you swallow. If you feel your mouth watering after you take a sip, then it certainly has a fair amount of acidity.
Finally, there is tannin. Tannins are only found in red wine, and they are a big part of the agability (no that’s not a word, but it should be!) of a wine. A wine with a lot of tannins will make you feel like you just took a bite out of an oak barrel. A high-tannin wine will make your mouth feel “sucked up” and dried-out. The longer a wine ages, the softer and more pleasant tannins become. If you try a 2006 or 2007 red and it feels like you just ate wood chips, it means that wine has some aging to do.
Practice identifying these characteristics, and your wine experiences will be rewarding and enriching. 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.