Perhaps you've already experienced it: there you are with your sweetheart, family or colleagues at a restaurant. The waiter comes to the table with an open bottle of wine and asks with a frugal smile: “Who tastes the wine?”
You respond a little too late yourself and someone else is already pointing at you…
So you can no longer avoid it, even if you would have preferred to see this chalice pass you by. But see it as a way to show that you belong in that world, that you know what to expect from wine. And impress the company!
Mind you, you can't order a bottle of wine and then say, after smelling it: “No, that’s not what I had in mind…” Basically you just check for faults, just like the waiter already did.
The procedure is to look at it, smell it, and taste it.
Looking is simple: you should preferably hold your glass above a white tablecloth or napkin and look into the glass from above as well as from the side.
It looks good to tilt your glass so that you distribute the little wine you get to taste as widely as possible in the glass. It just depends on how confident you want to appear, or how confident you are… But don't overdo it, ten minutes before the hour is a great and safe angle to tilt the glass.
What are you looking for? First and foremost, impurities. Attention, they are not necessarily wrong! But you don't expect them, especially if you usually drink completely filtered budget wine. If you want to score big with your company here, you can notice, when you see some solid particles, that the wine already shows character. But then it shouldn't be about the bits of cork that they can see from across the table...
By the way: a little cork will not affect the quality of the wine and they will disappear unnoticed in the throat, but if the restaurant charges a large margin on wine, for the service among other things, then this is not correct.
If you see small impurities in the wine, you should think of fruit juice. The better fruit juice also has pulp, the one without has less taste. You can also have this with olive oil, for example. The consideration is that you generate more flavor by leaving small solids in the wine. It's not meant to chew on, but it's a potential way to improve the flavor. And nothing prevents you from asking if the wine was filtered less than usual, that's not a stupid comment. The waiter has to confirm that it is such a wine, which increases your credibility.
If you have a glass of old red wine in your hand, then it may be the result of sediment. This may be the case in the bottle, that would be normal, but not if it’s in your glass. Then, the bottle is shaken, or poured clumsily. For the fair amount of money someone will be paying for such a bottle, it's 'not done'...
What else do you see when you look at the wine? The color!
Of course, you can see whether the wine is white, rosé, red or a variation, but there is more to see!
The intensity of the color, especially with red, already shows some of its temperament.
A light red wine will probably be situated more in the north, for example central France. It is probably made from larger, juicy, thin-skinned grapes, such as Pinot Noir, and lighter in nature than a dark red wine that comes from small, thick-skinned grapes from the South, with more tannins and complexity. (Though you may know some boring redheads and fiery blondes, so to speak…)
Be careful about saying things like this as you evaluate the wine. There will always be exceptions and if you don't know which wine was ordered, it's better to just nod and mumble in approval. Think of the information above as confirming, or disproving, assumptions.
The color of the wine is related to its age. Purple nuances indicate young wine. Shades of brown, usually on the outer edge, indicate more maturity.
You can also waltz while watching the wine. This is moving the glass around in such a way that the wine is twisted up the rim of the glass. It's a trick, easy to practice, but it looks pretty professional when you do it off-the-cuff. Are you unsure if that will work? Set your glass down on the table and swirl it around in two-inch circles. It has the same effect, but it is less dangerous for yourself, the table setting and the people next to you. And the ceiling.
Oh, and practicing at home is best done with water. You'll thank me if it ever goes wrong.
We are still watching and now is the time to evaluate the “tears”. If the wine has quickly disappeared from the side of the glass after waltzing, it is a rather light, perhaps young wine. If thick streams (the tears) slowly form on the sides of the glass, then it is a wine with a serious alcohol content. It might be the moment to say: “This will be one to chew on!” But again: beware of comments that can be refuted.
So much for watching, and just to be clear: this all takes 10 to 15 seconds. Nobody expects you to give a monologue about it! You just want to do some things that give the right impression. And yourself some self-confidence. There's nothing more saucy than someone who takes the tasting glass, chugs it all at once and says "Okay". Then you should go for big pints of beer.
Time to start smelling, and we actually combine that with watching the wine after the waltzing. Because you basically do that rolling to give the wine some oxygen and to release the scents.
Don't let anyone fool you, eighty percent of wine tasting is done with the nose! We'll come back to that later.
So after the waltzing, look at the tears and the color, and gently, briefly sniff the wine. You repeat the rolling and sniff the glass again. Feel free to stick your nose deep into the glass if the glass, and your nose, allows it. Unless perhaps to confirm a specific scent, don't do that more than twice. Because, first of all, the nose gets tired quickly and on a fourth try probably little smell will get through to an untrained wine sniff. And also because your table mates are waiting to taste too. Yes, they may not want to taste while everyone else is watching them, but they do want to taste in the end…
You also want to avoid taking so long that people expect an explanation. Limit yourself to nodding approvingly, like before. Avoid mentioning aromas if you've already had a drink, you can miss the ball so hard that you’ll hear it for the rest of your life.
Anyway, what do we learn from the smell? That there are no bad odors, although petrol or stable are not necessarily negative… But we are looking for chemical smells, if a wine has been treated too heavily with sulphites and the like, and whether this has been at the expense of quality. Or cork, although the waiter will have checked that.
Again, don't get overconfident! "Is that cork I smell?" about a bottle with a screw cap… And you are screwed instead!
Once that's done, the hardest part is over. We take a small sip of wine, hold it in our mouth for a moment, nod in approval and say something along the lines of “Exactly what I expected...” or a jolly “It will go in smoothly!”, depending on the company. And thank the waiter for the neat service.
I myself then say, nodding affirmatively: “Perfect. Thank you." You can do little wrong with it. It can even mean: “Not very interesting, but neither is the company at the table…”
If you are not so sure, then immediately start on another topic. Because there is a chance that you will get annoying questions like “What were you looking at like that?” or "It's a fruity wine, isn't it?" Approving murmurs will not save you then.
But admit it: if you are invited to a restaurant by your lover's parents for the first time, or if you want to impress your employer or a potential partner, these are twenty to thirty seconds well spent!
And know that your glass will be topped up and you therefore have a slight lead…
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