Viscosity

If you enjoy wine, I’m sure you’ve noticed in your glass after swirling that beading forms and eventually drips down the side. These oozing drips are called “legs”. Both beading and legs indicate viscosity or richness in a wine. How thick the beading is and how fast or slow the legs come down the side can tell you how rich the wine will be when it’s eventually in your mouth. The thicker the beading and slower the legs, the richer the wine! Alcohol levels, oak treatment, fermentation temperatures or sugar content can affect the viscosity. So wines with higher alcohol, more oak or sweetness, generally show better viscosity. Just keep in mind that your glassware must be impeccably clean and void of any residual detergent to properly see this.

Order of Tasting

If tasting many wines at one time, there is a specific order you should go in so as not to fatigue your palate. Stylistically, taste white wine to red, dry to sweet, low alcohol to high alcohol, unoaked to oaky and light-bodied to full-bodied. Crossing over any of these boundaries can easily throw your palate right off and render it useless. Surely you can conceive of how tasting a tannic red wine, for instance, can totally numb your taste buds to something substantially lighter like a Riesling, just because of tannins’ coating action. If you happen to find yourself in this predicament and want to go back and taste a product out of sync, as it were, look for some bubbly in the room. Bubbles have an uncanny knack of cleaning the palate nicely. Happy tasting.

Clinical Evaluation vs. Social Enjoyment

Sampling wine in a clinical setting like a wine tasting and then in a social setting like a dinner or party is quite different. Clinical tasting focuses strictly on the wine without the benefit of extraneous stimuli to play off it. The wine is literally dissected for appearance, smell and taste much like an autopsy in a sterile environment. Social appreciation usually involves food, friends, conversation and a relaxed atmosphere so the wine is interwoven into a hedonistic, enjoyable experience. Often, wine that doesn’t show that well in clinical evaluation comes across far better in a social setting. That’s because wine and food are a marriage made in heaven and together, stimulate social interaction and fun.

De-alcoholized Wine

Ever hear of de-alcoholized wine? It’s one in which the alcohol has been removed. Two methods exist for achieving this. The first is by reverse osmosis called the Ariel Process. Here wine flows along a membrane that separates it into a syrupy concentrate of alcohol and water. Repeated many times, water is reintroduced to the wine to create the finished product. The second method is the Billabong Process where a spinning cone column reduces the ethanol content. Done several times, the first separates the aroma compounds and the second removes the alcohol. In both cases, the finished wine, although quite different, is alcohol free. As far as taste goes, it’s a far cry from the original.