Learning to distinguish aromas at a wine tasting is an asset to determining characteristics of various wines. You’ve seen professionals take their wine tasting glass and swirl and sniff the wine before tasting it. Well, that is how they release the aromas in a wine in order to be able to determine the quality of the wine they are tasting.

It’s not hard to see how using your nose can help understand what you are tasting at a wine tasting event. Your sense of smell translates as much information or more about a wine as tasting it does. In fact your nose gives you more information than your sense of taste.

To understand how the nose affects taste, try holding your nose when you eat or drink something with noticeable aromas. You will find it difficult to pick out tastes without the aid of your nose. Sniffing and slowly analyzing a wine will impart much more info rather than hurrying through a wine tasting.

While your taste buds are replaced every two weeks, enabling your sense of taste to remain fresh, the process slows as you age. This makes older folks better able to appreciate wines with higher tannins or higher acids and younger people less tolerant. Some will even turn to keeping wine journals to keep track of which wines they like and which ones they don’t.

The younger you are the more susceptible to the flavors of a wine which is why so many people new to wine choose a wine for beginners as they cannot tolerate wines heavy in tannin and acidity. When you bite into food aromas are released and they travel to your nose where more flavors are sent to the brain to be identified.

Men lack more in the sniffing arena than women. Women’s sense of smell is far superior to men’s and you will find more women joining wine clubs or attending wine tastings more frequently. Research shows women purchase more wine than men when as they are exposed to more wines as a result.

So after you’ve smelled the wine you will get even more aromas and flavors once you sip the wine and swirl it around in your mouth. It will benefit you more to let the wine hit every part of your mouth for about a minute before you swallow to allow all the flavors to get exposed. You can taste four flavors in any food or drink: salty, sweet, bitter and sour and your tongue has its own section for each of these tastes. Allowing the wine to hit all sections will give you greater information about wine tasting.

If you want to be the best at determining characteristics of wine and know exactly what wine is right for you, you should attend as many wine tasting events as you are able to. Exposing yourself to as many wines as possible will help you learn more about wine and once you’ve done it enough you’ll be able to decipher layers of flavors. Even your friends will be amazed at your wine expertise.

Tags : Wine