Learning to taste wine

Wine is an endlessly fascinating subject. There is always something new to learn and lots of ways to do it -- books, magazines, newsletters, TV shows, podcasts, classes, websites. But the best way to learn about wine is to taste wine, lots of wine. You get to drink a lot of wine as well, but there’s a big difference between tasting wine and drinking wine. The difference is loving wine versus understanding wine. 
 
To understand wine, you need to approach it methodically. When the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning explored her love for future husband, the poet Robert Browning, in Sonnet 43: How do I Love Thee, she literally counted the ways. Her famous poem, which many wrongly attribute to Shakespeare, goes on to detail the depth, breadth, and height of her love, which transcended time and space. 
 
You don’t need a fourteen-line sonnet with a fixed rhyming scheme, but it helps to have more than “a big, red” or “a not-too-sweet white.” Tasting a wine requires a systematic approach so you can make sense of the aromas and flavors you’re smelling and tasting. In fact, the aromas you get from a wine are the most important part of tasting. The taste buds in your mouth can detect five distinct flavors (sweet, sour, spicy, bitter and umami), while you can distinguish over a trillion different scents (I won’t be listing those here). That’s why the first thing a sommelier does after opening a bottle is smell rather than taste the wine. 
 
It might sound daunting, but it’s not. It just takes practice, which is lots of fun. Plus, learning to taste is the best way to expand your palate. So, the focus of our Saturday tasting this weekend will be tasting. We’ll have three red and two white wines to analyze along with bowls of fruits, vegetables, spices and herbs to help sharpen your tasting senses.