Broaden Your Palette: a Guide to Wine Tasting

There is nothing that has become more fashionable lately than wine tasting. What used to be a pastime reserved for the superrich is now accessible to everyone, and has become quite a popular hobby among those is the 21-40 year old age group. There are even retreats and seminars dedicated to educating people about wines and wine tasting, including which wines go with what types of food, the types of wines that are out there, and how to identify them. However, you do not have to go to a seminar or a retreat to find out more about wine. You can perform your own wine tastings at home. All you need is a notebook, a bottle of wine, and a wine tasting book like Jancis Robinson's How to Taste: A Guide to Enjoying Wine to get started. When buying your wine, try to seek out a sommelier, which is a highly trained, very knowledgeable wine professional that can basically tell you, just by looking at the bottle, what you are in for in terms of taste and body. Higher end liquor stores normally employ them on an full or part time basis, and asking a sommelier where to start will be very helpful to you as a wine tasting beginner. Get your friends involved as well; wine tasting is a wonderful social activity, and a great alternative to a cocktail party. To get you started, here are a few tips for tasting wines, sure to make you look like a professional in no time.

The first thing you want to make sure of is that you have the correct glasses for the type of wine you will be drinking. Clear, stemmed glasses are best so that you can see what you are drinking to evaluate the color and other attributes, but you want to note that there are different types of glasses for each type of wine, red, white, and champagne, or sparkling. In addition, the rims of the glasses that you choose should be bent inward so that you can swirl the wine around in the glass without spilling it. This will also help you in detecting the wine's aroma.