How to taste

Tasting is not a gift. It's a protocol — the same four moves every time, in the same order. I've watched hundreds of people discover in one evening that they were tasters all along; they'd simply never been shown where to point their attention. So let's point it.

Step one: look

legs = alcohol, not quality

Pour about 75 ml — a third of a glass, no more. You need room to swirl. Tilt the glass to 45 degrees against something white: a napkin, a menu, your shirt if you're brave. Now read the colour, because colour is a confession.

In whites, pale platinum says young, unoaked, probably crisp. Deep gold says oak, age, or grapes picked late and heavy with sugar. Whites darken as they get older; reds do the opposite and fade, going from purple to brick to garnet. In reds, a colour with red tints usually means higher acidity, while a blue-violet tinge points to lower acid. And pale reds are not weak reds — Pinot Noir, Gamay and Grenache are simply born with thinner skins and less pigment. Genetics, not timidity. If you can't see your fingers through the glass at all, you're likely holding Malbec, Syrah or Petite Sirah.

Then everyone asks about the legs — those slow tears sliding down the inside of the glass. They're real physics. Alcohol has a lower surface tension than water, so as it evaporates it drags the liquid up and lets it fall back in streaks. The Marangoni effect, if you want to win an argument. Thick, slow legs mean more alcohol or more sugar. What they never mean is quality. A wine with gorgeous legs can still taste like a wet dog wearing perfume.

The look is also your safety check. Cloudy when it shouldn't be, brown before its time, fizzing when nothing on the label promised bubbles — trouble, every time. The one false alarm: small crystals in the bottom of the glass. Those are tartrates, "wine diamonds", harmless flakes of tartaric acid that fell out of solution in the cold. Drink on.

Step two: smell (this is the whole game)

doggy sniffs. really.

Here's the number that changes everything: roughly 90% of what you call flavour is actually aroma. Your tongue handles five basic tastes. Your nose handles thousands of compounds. When people say a wine "tastes of cherry", their nose did that. So swirl — it flings aroma molecules into the air — and get your nose properly into the glass.

But don't take one long, heroic drag. Your olfactory receptors fatigue within seconds, and after a deep sniff you'll smell almost nothing. Take short, quick sniffs instead — I call them doggy sniffs, because that's exactly what a dog does, and dogs are the professionals here. If your nose goes blank mid-tasting, sniff your own forearm. Your skin is your brain's neutral reference, and it resets the system. You will look odd. It works.

Geography matters even inside the glass. Heavier fruit aromas pool near the lower lip of the glass; lighter florals drift up to the rim. Move your nose around. Two positions, two wines.

What you're smelling sorts into three families. Primary aromas come from the grape itself — fruit, flowers, herbs. Secondary aromas come from winemaking, mostly fermentation: that buttery note in some Chardonnays is diacetyl, the exact molecule that makes popcorn smell like popcorn. Tertiary aromas come from age — nuts, leather, dried fruit, forest floor. My favourite party trick lives here: mature Riesling smells of petrol, and it's one single compound, TDN, that develops in the bottle. Once someone points it out, you can never miss it again.

That's the honest secret of every sommelier: we don't have better noses, we have bigger smell libraries. You build one by smelling things on purpose. Open your spice jars and name them with your eyes closed. Smell the lemon before you zest it. Every aroma you can name is one you'll find in a glass later.

Step three: taste

the finish is where the money went

Finally. Take one generous first sip to coat your whole mouth and wake the palate, then work in small sips. Now pay attention to time, because a wine is a sentence with a beginning, a middle and an end: the attack (the first impression, usually fruit and sweetness), the mid-palate (body, acid, texture), and the finish (whatever stays after you swallow). Cheap wine tends to have a hole in the middle — a loud hello, then nothing, then a short goodbye. Great wine keeps talking. A finish that lasts twenty seconds or more and actually changes as it fades is the most reliable sign of quality I know.

Try the retro-nasal trick: swallow, close your mouth, and breathe out slowly through your nose. Aroma compounds travel up the back of your throat to your receptors and you get a second broadcast of the whole wine, often clearer than the first. This is also why wine tastes of cardboard when you have a cold.

Where things register in your mouth is usefully specific. Sweetness lands on the tip of your tongue in the first seconds — and if you're unsure whether a wine is truly sweet or just smells sweet from ripe fruit, pinch your nose and sip; sugar survives the pinch, aroma doesn't. Acidity makes you salivate: the more your mouth waters after swallowing, the higher the acid. Tannin is that drying, tea-bag grip on your gums and cheeks — a texture, not a taste. And alcohol shows up as warmth at the back of your throat on the way down.

Step four: conclude

"why" is the whole exercise

Now the step almost everyone skips: form an opinion on purpose. First, balance — did any one element (sweetness, acid, tannin, alcohol) shout over the others, or did they hold hands? Second, give the wine a memory hook. Not "notes of cassis with a mineral undertow". Something you'll actually remember: "the one that smelled like my grandmother's plum jam". Absurd hooks stick; polished ones evaporate.

Then rate it simply. We use a rigorous scientific scale here that runs from "bleh" to "last meal on earth", and honestly it outperforms the 100-point kind, because it forces the only question that matters: did you like it, and why? The why is where taste becomes knowledge. "I liked it because the acid made me hungry" teaches you something about yourself that no critic's score ever will.

If you want to learn fast, taste in pairs. Comparison is the shortcut — one glass alone has nothing to push against. Three flights that teach more in an evening than a month of single bottles:

• Same grape, two regions — a Chablis next to an Australian Chardonnay, and suddenly you can taste what climate does.
• Same wine, two vintages — the clearest lesson in what a year of weather means.
• Same style, two prices — sometimes the expensive one wins, sometimes it doesn't, and both results teach you to trust your palate over the label.

When the wine is broken

One last skill, and it will pay for this entire course: knowing when a wine is faulty, not merely a style you dislike. Faulty wine is a defective product. Sending it back is not rude — it's how the system is supposed to work.

The fault	What you'll notice	What to do
Corked (TCA)	Wet cardboard, musty cellar; the fruit sounds muffled. Hits up to 1 in 20 bottles — screw caps included, since TCA can lurk in the winery itself	Send it back. No apology needed
Oxidised	Browner than it should be, smells of bruised apple, tastes flat and tired	Send it back — it's been suffocated by air
Reduction	Boiled garlic, struck match, rubber — too little air during winemaking	Wait. It often blows off with a swirl and ten minutes; the old trick of stirring with a silver spoon genuinely helps
Heat damage	Cooked, jammy, stewed fruit — wine starts cooking around 32°C	Nothing can be done. Never leave wine in a hot car

That's the whole protocol. Look, smell, taste, conclude. Do it with every glass for a month — thirty seconds each, no ceremony — and you'll taste more in your Tuesday wine than most people taste in a lifetime of expensive ones.

next: the six things you're actually feeling