Salut/Hi Liam,
le/on Fri, 04 Feb 2005 00:47:00 GMT, tu disais/you said:-
>My wife never liked wine before I started finding out the proper
>temperatures and glasses. I had no idea the glass could make such a huge
>difference! I thought, yeah whatever, it all goes in the mouth. How's
>the glass make a difference.
If you saw my remarks about a cheese and wine tasting, you'll see that I
feel that it is essential to have decent glasses to drink good wine. And of
course the temperature at which you serve wine makes a huge difference to
your perception of a wine. As general advice, serve a wine a few degrees too
cold (note I'm NOT, repeat NOT saying that you should serve them all
freezing) and see how it comes into focus as it warms up. I don't go so far
as to say that you need 15 different expensive Riedel glasses to be able to
enjoy your wine. I'd suggest that an INAO shaped glass is excellent when
tasting to judge a wine, as it gives a reference. When it comes to drinking,
I'd suggest that two basic shapes will do, not TOO huge, (the Sommelier
range is an specialised analytical tool, IMO) one for Cabernet Sauvignon
types and the other for Pinot Noir types. The INAO will do for all whites
except your top white burgundies (Chardonnays) and you could serve these in
a cab sauv red glass that is decently sized without being huge.
If you wanted to get - in the same range - a couple of other shaped glasses
to see how the same wine shows in different glasses, there would be no harm,
but I suspect you'll find that two plus the INAO will do fine.
As for techniques in tasting. Remember that tasting is quite different to
drinking. Tasting is primarily to analyse the wine, trying to see whether it
has faults, what the balance is going to be like, if it's age-worthy and so
on. Although lots of us here have got into a (bad?) habit of drinking wine
almost as if we were tasting it, drinking should, IMO be primarily for
pleasure. OK, with that preamble out of the way. Some facts.
In your mouth, divorced from ANY sense of smell, we can taste salt, sweet
sour and bitter. Some have added "hot" (as in chillies) and "tasty". But if
you lost all sense of smell, that's all you'd get. So although therefore you
should try to get the wine to all parts of the mouth to get as much taste as
possible, the most important sense we use when tasting and drinking wine is
smell.
So the "tasting" techniques used for wine are designed to get as good a
smell as possible.
What I do (everyone will vary) (after looking at the colour and smelling
alone) is to take a good sip, chew it around my mouth, and then cup my
tongue to try to get the wine pooled there. I then pull air in _over_ that
pool, making a kind of sucking action, and trying not to inhale excess wine.
This frees lots of aromas from the surface as the wine is warmed by my
mouth, and sucking, gets these aromas where I want then, at the back of my
mouth. I then exhale the air through my nose, so that the aromas get there
too. I normally don't need to do that more than a couple of times to allow
me to begin to analyse the component smells. You may find you need less, or
more tastes. Finally, when I'm tasting seriously, I spit out the wine,
exzpelling it in a thin stream with my tongue through pursed lips. I may
then smalck my lips (and mouth metophorically) to get the aftertaste.
Spitting is an integral part of serious tasting. Alcohol has the capacity of
desensitizing your palate, so if you drink down 3-4 tasting samples, you've
destroyed your capacity to analyse accurately.
Hope all that helps a bit.
>my goal is to have at least one individual glass for every wine type.
>(The Riedel catalog is a very dangerous thing. *grin*)
(Don't bother, better spend the money on wine!)
--
All the Best
Ian Hoare
http://www.souvigne.com
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