🍷 Wine tasting
Careful tasting: looking at the colour, smelling, tasting and judging.
Wine tasting is the careful sensory assessment of a wine. The taster looks at the colour and clarity, smells the aroma, tastes the wine in the mouth and notes how long the sensations last.
What is assessed? The appearance, the aroma, the true tastes (acidity, bitterness, sweetness), the mouthfeel such as astringency from tannins, heat and weight, and the balance and persistence of all these sensations. To describe aromas, tasters use the Wine Aroma Wheel, a chart that groups aroma descriptors.
In a blind tasting the identity of the wine is hidden so that the taster is not prejudiced; assessing a wine blind is considered best practice. For routine critical sensory evaluation the ISO tasting glass is accepted: it holds about 210 mL when brimful, and a standard tasting serve is 30 to 50 mL.
How it connects to Wine
🍷 Wine tasting → works with → 🍷 Sommelier → works with → 🍷 Wine
Links
- Previous step
- 🍷 ISO tasting glass, 🍷 Wine aroma wheel, 🍷 Spittoon
- Works with
- 🍷 Sommelier
- Part of
- 🍷 Wine taste and composition
- Wine and milk
- ✅ Quality control
- In other topics
- 👅 Olive oil taster, 🏷️ Extra virgin olive oil
Frequently asked questions
How is wine tasted?
Look at the colour and clarity, smell the aroma, then taste and judge the flavour, mouthfeel, balance and persistence.
What is a blind tasting?
A tasting where the identity of the wine is hidden so that the taster is not prejudiced; it is considered best practice.
Guides
What to read next
- ✅ Quality control — Fat, protein, bacteria, antibiotics, acidity.
- 🍷 Sommelier — A wine expert in a restaurant who recommends and serves wine with food.
- 🍷 Spittoon — A small bucket for spitting out wine at a tasting so as not to get drunk.
- 🏷️ Extra virgin olive oil — Top category of olive oil: mechanical extraction only, no taste defects, free acidity up to 0.8 g per 100 g; confirmed by a tasting panel.
Similar
🍷 Wine aroma · 🍷 Polyphenols · 🍷 Acidity · 🍷 Tears of wine · 🍷 Body (wine) · 🍷 Wine colour