Handy hints and tips > Wine tasting tips

The Concours de Bordeaux - Vins d'Aquitaine competition calls upon several hundreds of professional tasters: wine experts, cellar masters, merchants, wine stewards, wine brokers, specialised journalists, among others. The decision of whether or not to award the medal is taken collectively after individual analysis of each sample. You cannot learn how to taste wine just by snapping your fingers. Would you like an introduction? Here are a few very simple exercises taken from "Découvrir la dégustation", a book giving an introduction to wine tasting published by Feret.

These exercises can enhance your appreciation of the fullness of the wine, which is the 3rd stage in wine tasting after the colour and the nose. They require you to prepare solutions that will then be presented blindly. By blocking your nose during the tasting, you eliminate any olfactory sensations that may add to the sensations of taste with some preparations. It is fun to do this among friends…

Discovery exercises

The aim is to identify simple, isolated sensations of taste from materials that are commonly found in kitchens. Test the following mixtures to remind yourself of all the tastes and flavours recognised by our palates. The results will surprise you!

Sour
Add ½ teaspoon of white vinegar or 1 teaspoon of lemon juice to 1/20 l of water.

Sweet
Add 1 teaspoon of caster sugar to 1/20 l of water.

Salty
Add ½ a demitasse spoon of table salt to 1/20 l of water.

Bitter
Mix 1 teaspoon of ground coffee in 1/20 l of cold water. Filter the solution.

Astringency
Bite on grape seeds or let them macerate in water for one night, after crushing them.

Heat
Dilute 1 teaspoon of eau de vie or odourless vodka in 1/20 l of water.

Cold
Menthol: Soak 1 tablet of menthol chewing-gum in ¼ l of water.

Spiciness
Take 1 demitasse spoon of pepper and add to 1/20 l of water.

• Always cut off the metal cap which surrounds the bottleneck below the glass ring surrounding the neck. This prevents the latter from coming into contact with the metal or with impurities when the wine is served.



• A good corkscrew should have at least 5 and a half coils.



• Do not fill the glass completely when serving the wine: between a third and a half glass is enough. You can thus swirl the wine in the glass to help release the aromas.



• Even if wine does not respond well to thermal shock, it’s not a bad idea to leave a red wine in the fridge for ten minutes, rather than serving it too warm.



• At the bottom of a bottle, you’ll sometimes find small translucent crystals. These are natural tartrate precipitations which in no way detract from the quality of the wine. If you taste them, you’ll find they have a slight lemony flavour.



• The bubbles of a sparkling wine, such as a Crémant de Bordeaux, are formed by impurities found in the glass. This means that in a perfectly clean and smooth glass, sparkling wines will not produce any bubbles!



• Before laying your table, check that the wine glasses are free of unpleasant odours, especially if they are stored upside down. Odours found in cardboard, wood and cupboards can alter the taste of the wine.



• A wine’s hardness and astringency are due in part to the tannins of wines which come into contact with the proteins found in saliva. But when an astringent wine is tasted with cheese, these tannins will be softened, because they will react with the proteins in the cheese, instead of with those in the saliva. Thus the wine will appear to be more supple.