Home
Wine is music
Wine is living art
Like a short story, a sip of wine has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning is looking and smelling. The middle is from the time you put the wine in your mouth until you swallow. The end is all the tastes and sensations that happen after you swallow.
The beginning:
The beginning is looking and sniffing.
To really understand this part of the story, you must have a proper glass, which means it must be big enough, clear enough, and curved enough.
The size(10-20 ounces) is important because you need to have plenty of room to swirl some wine in the glass to aerate it and generate vapors without worrying about spilling it.
The shape is important for the same reason, so you can generate some centrifugal force on the wine in the glass to give it a good aeration. The shape is also important to capture and hold the vapors so you can get a good sniff of them.
The clarity of the glass, along with the shape, is important to allow you to tilt the glass and see the color of the wine and how it varies as different depths allow more or less light through.
To read the beginning of this wine's story, pour about two ounces into a proper glass. Tilt the glass over a white background, in good light, and observe how the color changes from the deepest part to the edge, how cloudy or clear it is, and light or dark it is in hue. Notice how you respond to the visual sensations. Most wines look very beautiful in the glass, and it is pleasant to take a moment to enjoy this simple sensation of light through the wine.
After you have looked at the wine, hold the glass by the stem or the bottom and give it a good swirl for several seconds. Some wines, especially young ones from just-opened bottles, take longer to aerate and release their aromas; the bouquet will evolve for minutes and hours after the bottle is opened.
To sniff the wine, first hold the glass under your nose at some distance, and notice as you bring it toward your nose at what distance you first detect the aroma...then hold it close to your face and go ahead and put your nose right into the glass, and sniff...you can do a long slow inhalation, or a number of short sniffs, whatever pleases you. Just notice the experience.
Wine has thousands of chemical compounds in it that make each wine unique, so take plenty of time with this part of the story. Also, all of these compounds change with exposure to air, so no two sniffs will be the same, even though they are all part of this wine's unique story. The five minutes after opening sniff is likely quite different from the one hour after opening sniff. So there is really a new chapter to the story each time you sniff.
As you let the aromas drift through your experience, you might find that some of the individual nuances of the aroma remind you of things you have smelled before, like different kinds of fruits or berries at different stages of ripeness, or honey or cigar smoke or tar or leather or whatever. Sometimes it is fun to find names for these nuances that seem familiar, and the names also help you to remember the characteristics of this particular wine. But the important thing for the reader is just to take the time to notice the aromas and enjoy them as part of this unique story.
(to be continued)