Wine Tip #4 – Wine Tasting: Courting

Before you pour your wine, throw back your head and dump your wine down the old shoot, you might want to slow it down a bit. There are basically four points to consider when tasting wine: appearance, smell, taste, and finish. Let’s go through each one. We are going to review the first one in this post.

Appearance or Courting the Wine:
You can tell a lot about a person on a first date if you are willing to listen and pay attention. Similar to dating, you can tell a lot about wine just from its appearance: grape variety, origin, age, and whether or not it spent any time in wood barrels.  Therefore take some time to notice some of  these details.

After you have poured your wine, take notice of the color.  Tilt the glass away from you in front of a white background.  As a white wine gets older it gets darker in color. As a red wine gets older, it gets lighter in color.  Notice if there is a variation in color in the wine. The greater variation in color from the center to the edge, the older the wine.  If either color looks brown, it is more than likely spoiled and dated. Here is a helpful color chart to help you identify wines by there color: Wine Color Chart.

Similar to love, patience is key in wine tasting, you don’t want to make a mad dash to the bedroom before foreplay has even started and end up finishing early without experiencing the joy and pleasure of the build up. So, before even thinking about swirling your wine, never mind putting it in your mouth, smell the wine in this calm state when the aromas are most volatile. You will be able to determine if the wine is faulty or spoiled. Take mental note of the aromas before you swirl. Your getting the hang of this and as a result your going to have more satisfying experience.

Ah…teasing, flirting and being a bit coy, she is ready to breathe. It’s time to swirl your wine to open her up, the oxygen will release the less volatile aromas so you can get the full essence of her. STOP! WAIT,  before you stick your honker in the glass and take a whiff, try to notice the thickness and alcohol content of the wine by checking out her legs. Do the legs/tears run down the side of the glass slowly or quickly? Are they small or big? The quicker they run, the lighter the wine and less alcohol. The slower they run, the heavier or more thick the wine and more alcohol. Additionally the more legs the more alcohol, but don’t be fooled the alcohol content doesn’t mean quality.

Lastly if your tasting a red, check out the rim, eh hem, stay with me here, keep it clean! The rim variation is another term for meniscus which simply is the rim of the wine in a glass that can tell you the age and concentration of a wine. Generally speaking, the more variation in color from the center to the edge the older the wine will be.

Your patience is paying off. Now you’re ready to advance to second base: it’s time to smell the wine. Lift your glass to your nose, not your mouth as tempting as that may be, and take a whiff, but not to much ‘cuz you don’t want to drink it through your nose, that would be most unattractive and embarrassing.

Enhance your wine drinking experience and Download and print The Wine Wench’s Tasting Notes Guide

Next Post – Second Base: Smelling The Wine

Rapid Ice Wine Cooler

This weekend I invested in a VacuVin Rapid Ice Wine Cooler since I prefer my wines chilled. My private collection consists largely of red wines and in my opinion red wines are served to warm. This is a great little bar tool every wino should have. It is easy and doesn’t take up any space. Simply place it in the freezer six hours before you plan on drinking. When you are ready to drink your wine, you remove the rapid ice wine cooler from the freezer and slide over your wine bottle. In about five minutes your wine will be chilled and it keeps it chilled.

Thanks to heating and air conditioning, modern house temperatures are 68 to 73 degrees… I know people who keep theirs higher. Historically, the average room temperature was 55 to 65 degrees and this is the ideal serving temperature. You can quickly see why modern homes aren’t conducive for your wine and would be wise to invest in a wine storage cooler.

Red wines should be served between 55 to 65 degrees. As Master Sommelier Alpana Singh says:

Serving reds closer to their proper cellar temperature heightens the fruit flavor while lessening the alcohol aroma, giving the wine a more vivid structure with focused acidity.  She recommends drinking warm, rather than chilled, vodka to see the difference.

Cheap wines and lighter wines should chilled too. The grape acidity reacts to the cold in a way that makes the wine crispy and snappy, “brightening the wines acidity and heightening its fruitiness, giving it a crunchy, rich texture that will make the simpler or less expensive red wines taste richer and fuller,” says Alpana Singh from Alpana Pours.

Heavier and more complex wines should be served warmer…but not at modern day room temperatures.

Wine Type——————————–Serving Temperature
Sparkling (red, white, rose)                                     40-45
White                                                                                 45-50
Rose & light-bodied red                                             50-55
Medium-bodied red                                                     55-60
Full-bodied red                                                             60-65

To get a more extensive idea of what temperature your favorite wine should be served at visit Nuvo Vino’s Wine Temperature Chart and Wine Temperature Tutorial.

It is a good idea to invest in a Wine Thermometer to get the full essence from your wines.

What happens if the wine temperature is too high?
The higher the temperature, the faster the volatile compounds evaporate from wine in a glass. When red wine is served above 68°F, the alcohol can begin to evaporate so quickly that it unbalances the wine. This same effect happens with whites at about 58°F.

The palate is increasingly sensitive to sweetness the higher the temperature. Most sweet wines have low acidity in relation to their sweetness. When served too warm they taste cloyingly sweet. Chilling sweet wines tempers the sweetness while showcasing the acidity for balance.

With sparkling wines, the higher the temperature, the faster carbon dioxide is released. This not only creates overly frothy wines after opening, but they become flat very quickly.

What happens if the wine temperature is too low?
Quite simply, wine served too cold causes an imprisonment of important aromas derived from the grape. Whites and reds served too cool can taste rather dead, withholding their prominence. In the case of reds, tannins will taste rough and bitter. Serving reds warmer will soften those rough tannins. -Nuvo Vino Temperature Tutorial

Wine Tip #9 – When Should I Drink My Wine?

This is a great question and can cause a great deal of confusion for the majority of pleasure seeking wine drinkers. I’m not going to get into storing or collecting wine in this post, that is a subject all on its own I’m not read to tackle.

When I first started drinking wine I believed, like many wine drinkers, that all wine got better with age. I would hold onto wine only to open it a year or two later to find it dull, flat, and gross. All wines aren’t created equal. Most wines are meant to drink right after bottling. In fact, less than 1% of wines are made to age for more than five years.

Most wines are made to be enjoyed while they are young, vibrant and fresh. Therefore, you should drink most wines after they hit the bottle to capture the wine’s best aromas and flavors.

You should drink most red wines within two to five years of the vintage/year. While most white wines within one to three years of the vintage/year. If there isn’t a year/vintage on the label, drink red wine within two years and white wine within one year of purchasing.

For the wines that you plan on drinking a year or two from now, make sure you store them on their side to keep the cork moist, fully plump and air tight (with the exception of sparkling wines and screwtop lids),  in a cool spot, preferably dark, away from harsh lights or artificial lighting, temperature fluctuations, heat, sunlight, any vibration, and chemical odors or strong smells. Invest in a nice wine storage cooler.

Refrain from storing unopened wine on your counter, especially in the sunlight. Recork and refrigerate.

Also, let wine sit and settle for 24 to 48 hours that has been shipped or that’s been in transit. Lastly, for wines you plan on holding on to longer than a few months, try not to purchase it if it has been sitting under artificial or well-lit shelves. Ask for a bottle that is still in the storage room, boxed up.

The best temperature for storing wine is 55% but a constant temperature between 53 and 60 is good too. Ideal humidity is 75%. Some people prefer it more or less.

A fun little tasting tip: if you have a wine from two separate vintages save them for your next tasting experiment and taste them at the same time. Also, experiment with temperature. First, taste the wine directly from the bottle before chilling, then put the remaining wine in the refrigerator or bring down using a VacuVin rapid ice wine cooler and try it again. You will be completely surprised at what you find.

Wine Tip #3 – Storing Opened Wine

Stop Pouring Your Money Down The Drain!

If you are like me, I can’t throw down an entire bottle of my favorite red by myself and more than likely, I always have left overs. When I first started drinking wine a few years back, I would just put the cork back in the wine and leave it on the counter for a few days. Hell, I didn’t even know what bad wine tasted like because I thought all wine tasted bad. Eventually I moved out of the trailer park and  made some more sophisticated friends who taught me a thing or two about wine. From there, I bought some of those decorative corks, replacing the cork itself, but didn’t realize that was really ineffective too ( my corks were those stainless steel with crystals, really pretty indeed). It wasn’t until I understood the whole air/oxygen/spoilage thing.

It wasn’t until about three years ago that I was introduced to the proper way to store my unused wine. It pains me to think of all the wine I wasted in those years due to my ignorance. Ah, the shame of it all.

There are several ways to store your unused wine, keep the flavor and enjoy the entire bottle instead of pouring it down the drain along with your hard earned money.

Depending on how much wine you have left over, this tip allows you to be true to the environment and recycle some of your glass bottles: use your left over glass bottles. I use my Kombucha bottles, but Perrier, and Ice Tea glass bottles work just as well. Note: DO NOT use plastic. If you have enough wine to fill the glass bottle up to the top, simply pour, screw the cap on tight and refrigerate.

This tip is for those of us who are a little heavier drinkers. If you don’t have enough wine to fill your entire glass bottle, purchase a wine vacuum which simply sucks the air out of the wine bottle. This little gadget save you a lot of money and guilt. As you know, it is important to get the air out of the bottle to avoid oxidation or the wine becoming oxidized. Again, once you remove the air from the bottle, refrigerate.

You don’t want to store wine in a decanter. Decanters are made to allow wine to breathe, not to store.

Lastly, if you follow these simple tips, a red wine that has been recorked and refrigerated will keep for about three days. A white or rose wine will keep for about two days. Plenty of time to finish her off! I now use my stainless steel stoppers for decoration and they are pretty!

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Oxidation is when a wine is spoiled due to faulty corks or if the wine has been left open for some time, the wine will taste off.

Oxidized in this post simply describes a wine which, after being exposed to oxygen because it was left open for several hours or more, has lost its freshness and has become stale. You can get a sense of what this taste likes by leaving a glass of wine out overnight to experience this taste.