Wine Tasting Part 3

Welcome to Vine to Wine his is your host Linda Moran and today we are continuing our series exploring the basics of tasting and understanding wine. Yesterday we talked more about the importance of color in a glass of wine and the clues it will give you about the wine. After we examine the color we see what it can tell us about how the wine might smell. There are people who devote entire careers to enticing us through our sense of smell. So there is your first clue, this is an important and exciting sense we are dealing with. In the case of wine, our sense of smell is telling us volumes. However, don't be too hard on yourself. It takes practice, some guidance and concentration to understand all it tells us. Knowing that your sense of smell is the greatest contributor to your ability to perceive flavor is helpful. Begin by swirling the wine and allowing the fragrances in the wine to be carried up towards your nose. Then ask yourself what the wine smells like. Does it smell like fruit or like flowers? If fruit, what kind of fruit? Apples? What kind of apple? Fresh apples or cooked apples? Just keep dialing it down and drilling into your perceptions. This is how we come to the final decision that the wine has an essence of baked tart apple. Notice I said baked and tart – not just apple - because I kept asking myself questions about what I smelled. Listen in tomorrow as we continue our series of understanding more about tasting wine and thank you for joining me on today's Vine to Wine.