Do you dread when you buy a bottle of wine at a restaurant and they pour a bit and give it to you to taste? What do they want from you? It tastes like wine, right? Well sometimes not. A wine can be off or bad. An off or bad wine can taste like wet cardboard, moldy mushrooms or vinegar.
I used to avoid buying a bottle before I took my formal WSET training, because I hated tasting wine in a restaurant like that. Even now when I know how to properly taste wine, I second guess my abilities to determine if it is off. But practice makes perfect right.
Knowing how to properly taste wine, doesn’t just help you determine if a wine is off, but it also helps you learn more about the wine you are drinking and what you like or don’t like about it. The whole point of tasting/drinking wine is to like it, right?
So we are going to explore the 3 steps to properly taste wine, why we do it, what we are looking for and what we get out of it. Other than drinking the wine of course.