Monday night. Our first session of the Swirl Girls @ Granada Bistro

What better way to learn about wine, than drinking it with your girlfriends? Armed with notebooks, deductive tasting charts, an array of elements, and our thirsty palates, we started the series with review of the Deductive Tasting Method

Sight, Nose, Palate, Conclusion

Sight

• Provides valuable information about a wine’s age and/or condition
• Key: tilt glass away from you against a white background

Generally speaking…

• White and blush wines grow darker with age, Red wines grow lighter with age
• Pigments and tannin in red wines precipitate into sediment with age
• Rim Variation is the difference in color between wine at the center of the glass and the wine at the edge (rim) of the glass. The older the wine, the more rim variation

• Check out the ‘legs’ of the wine as an indicator of residual sugar/alcohol level

Nose:

• Most important aspect of tasting, accounting for 85% of taste
• Three short sniffs (like a dog) is more effective than one long inhale.
• Concentrate on aromas in categories; fruit, non-fruit, earth, wood

Palate:

• Confirming what you have already smelled
• Focus on how the wine changes as it travels across your palate – especially the finish
• Sometimes very young wine smell different than taste

The Conclusion:

• Taking evidence gained from the sight, nose, and palate to form the best possible conclusion. Use process of elimination using markers for classical grape varietals.

In order to put these steps into practice, we sniffed samples of characteristics found in red and white wines:

Strawberries, blackberries, plums, truffles, black pepper, dark chocolate, cinnamon

Lemon, lime, oranges, peaches, wet grass, vanilla, butter, almonds

Once our noses were fully engrossed in aromas, we blind tasted two different wines using the Deductive Tasting Method; one New World, one Old World with outstanding results.

Homework for next week: Stop and smell the elements and taste all you can. After all, the best way to learn about wine is to drink it! Cheers