By now you have hopefully spent plenty of time looking at the colors of your wines, smelling the aromas, tasting them, and enjoying them! It’s time to begin putting your observations together so you can describe the wine to someone else. Why bother to do this? There can be many reasons: some people want to put tasting notes in their journals, some want to build an online database of the wines they have tried. But I think the most important reason is quite simple: by describing a wine that you really like, you can ask a wine shop staff member or a sommelier for a similar wine.
Generally, you want to be able to tell someone about the following characteristics:
- Acidity (crisp or soft)
- Mouthfeel (light, medium or heavy)
- Flavor style (mild, moderate, strong)
- Tannins (soft, medium or very drying) (in red wines)
When you add in the type of wine (white or red, perhaps a rosé) and maybe the grape variety, you have a pretty good description. Using this outline, here’s a description of a Riesling we enjoyed last night.
The Riesling had nice bright and crisp acidity, the wine was nice and light yet had really nice, intense flavors. (Since it’s a Riesling, there are no tannins to deal with.)
With this simple description given to a wine seller, I should end up with a similar wine that I would enjoy. Or, of course, if I didn’t like the wine, I could give the seller a description like this and she would know to avoid similar wines.
Many people are reluctant to try to describe wines. This may be because we read complex tasting notes with flowery descriptors that we may not be able to relate to, like “notes of toasty almonds and smoked bananas with underlying layers of lemon zest and butterscotch.” While each of these descriptors individually might make sense, being able to pull all of them out of a combination takes a lot of practice and perhaps some innate talent.
Bottom line, don’t let other tasting notes intimidate or deter you. Describe the wine in a way that makes sense to you–even if it seems “simple,” anyone else will know what you are talking about. And that’s all that counts.
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