Wine guides

How to recognize good wine

glossario-degustare
Written by EFW Staff

How to recognize good wine through tasting

Wine is a drink, different from the others because its history has always been linked with the human beings: it is the result of the passion and wine gives great emotions to the people able to appreciate it.

Wine has many important substances: some derives from the grapes, other from the process of fermentation, other during the process of ripening (in steel containers or barrels) or during the period of fining in the bottle.

The choice of the wine takes place through the tasting, to catch the deepest essence in order to comprehend each shade of colour, perfume and taste.

Tasting: visual, olfactory, taste analysis

Tasting means sip the wine carefully, think about its history and give an opinion without personal influences.

It is important to follow specific rules for a good tasting: the recognition of smells is the most difficult phase, thus during this phase it is important to not use too heavy perfumes or soaps.

Before the tasting, moreover, do not eat too spiced food like garlic or chilli pepper, nor liquorice or mint candies, to not modify the sensibility of our tasting buds.

The tasting tools are our senses: sight, smell, taste, touch, in fact we talk about sensorial analysis.

The phases of the tasting

Visual analysis

The visual analysis is the first step to evaluate a wine, it is able to give useful information about wine and its evolution.

The main elements to evaluate in this phase are: clearness, colour, consistency and for Spumante wines, the bubble also called perlage.

Olfactory analysis

It is the most difficult phase of the tasting; the parameters to evaluate aren’t that much (intensity, complexity and olfactory qualities), but what is difficult is the recognition of the shades of flavours.

The olfactory exam is needed to evaluate and understand the baggage of the perfumes of the wine. For instance, the smell of wild berries and red flowers that characterize young wines of the shades of exotic and dried fruit of the Passito wines.

Despite this phase, it is necessary to evaluate also possible flaws in the wine as for instance cork taint, moulds and sulphurous dioxide.

Taste-olfactory analysis

It means the tasting of the wine itself, that take into consideration the single sensations of the taste (sweetness, acidity, bitterness) and the touch (pseudo-heat, astringency, structure, consistency, pungency, thermal effect), scanning the wine.

The taste-olfactory analysis is a way to verify the forecast made during the visual and olfactory exam.

Quality of the wine: reading the label

To verify the quality of the wine it is necessary to know how to read the label: it represents the identity of the wine, as it is the document that certify the legal requirements to sell it. The label encloses the information for the consumer, in compliance with the law: names of the geographical units (IGT, DOC and DOCG), the information of the bottling and the one of the producer.

About the author

EFW Staff