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Wine tasting

Wine tasting

In order to carry out a wine tasting in the best conditions possible, it would be advisable to follow the recommendations listed below:

• The room temperature must be between 18 and 22 ºC.
• There must be no undue noise.
• The wine tasting area must be well lit.
• The level of humidity must be between 70-80 %.
• The wine tasting area must be well ventilated.
• The wines to be tasted must be at the correct temperature and served in the right order.
• The wine taster must be healthy, slightly hungry, and must have gone without smoking or having eaten strongly flavoured or aromatic foods within the last 2-3 hours.

During the wine tasting session itself, we must complete 4 clearly differentiated phases:

1. - The Visual Phase.

During this first phase the aspects we are going to consider are:

• Clarity: crystal clear, brilliant, clean, clear, opalescent, slightly cloudy, cloudy.
• Fluidity: normal, dense, oily, viscose.
• Effervescence: calm, gaseous, bubbly, frothy.
• Legs.

The range of colours that we are going to consider in the different wines are:

REDS Violet red Purple red Crimson red Ruby red Chestnut Brown

ROSÉS Raspberry rosé Strawberry rosé Redcurrant rosé Salmon

WHITES Grey-browns: mahogany, grey-brown, steel-grey. Yellows: old gold, golden, straw, pale straw. Greenish-yellows: greenish old gold, greenish gold, greenish straw, pale greenish straw.

2. - Olfactory Phase.

Once we have completed the visual phase, we move on to the olfactory phase, during which we are going to use our noses to appreciate the aromas of the wine:

- Direct Aromas

Without moving the glass: primary aromas, which are those pertaining to the grape itself.

Gently swirling the wine in the glass: this produces the secondary and tertiary aromas and allows us to experience the fermentation and developmental (aging) stages of the wine.

After vigorously swirling the wine in the glass: we extract the defects caused during the aging process.

- Aromatic Series:

• Animal: game, hide, leather, sweat, fat.
• Balsamic: pine, resin, juniper, ilex, eucalyptus.
• Empyreumatic: smoke, burnt, toffee, cocoa, rubber.
• Spices and aromatics: aniseed, fennel, cinnamon, vanilla, cloves, nutmeg.
• Ethereal and of fermentation: banana, acetone, yeast, cider, beer.
• Floral: lilies, blackberry, apple, plum, quince.
• Wood: acacia, oak, cedar, old wood, new wood, pencil.
• Chemical: acetic, alcohol, sulphurous, sulphydric.
• Vegetal: grass, hay, cabbage, bay leaf, tea.

3. - Oral Phase

After completing the olfactory phase, we move on to the actual tasting phase, that is to say the sensations that the wine produces in the mouth.

Indirect aromas: aftertaste.

Tactile sensations: temperature, freshness (acidity), warmth (alcohol), sharpness (carbonic and acetic), astringency, body (extract).

Tastes: sweet, salty, acidic and bitter.

4. - Final Phase

During this final phase of the wine tasting session, what we are evaluating in the wine is its persistence, in other words the sensations the wine gives us when we retain it in our mouths and the aftertaste, by which we mean the sensations we get from the wine once we have swallowed it.

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Ctra. De Avila s/n San Martín de Valdeiglesias 28680 Madrid
Tfno: +34 91.867.60.07 Fax: +34 91.861.02.72 Email: bodega@donalvarodeluna.com