Systematic Approach to Tasting Wine

I've recently attended the WSET basic wine course, which I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone. I was a little bit skeptical going in because I thought it would just be repeating what I learned from Wine Folly and the various winery visits. But the course turned out to be very informative, especially when it comes to the systematic approach to tasting wine which is depicted in the table below.

The table has many variations and gets more sophisticated the higher you go in the WSET levels. However, this basic version still helps in objectively rating a wine, which is very different from one's subjective preferences. This is especially hard when rating a wine that is objectively good, but you don't personally like.

The approach starts with the Eye, where the colour and its intensity of the wine is judged. Lemon and gold are typical colours for white wines, while purple, ruby and garnet are typical for red wines. There is a tip to judge the intensity for red wines: a red wine has a deep colour, if you can't see the stalk of the glass from the top.

The assessment then moves to the Nose, where a wine is judged to be complex if it has three or more notes of different aromas. Moving on, the aroma is especially difficult, which comes only with a lot of experience and practice. To help with this, an aroma parcours was setup at the beginning of each course where participants can try to identify different aromas from the Le Nez du Vin collection. While the aroma parcours definitely helped in recognising individual aromas, distinguishing them in the wine itself is more challenging. The intensity, however, can be more easily scored using this tip: the intensity is pronounced if you can smell the aroma without putting your nose in the glass, it is medium if you need to put your nose in, and light if the aroma is still very faint even if your nose is directly on top of the wine.

The Palate has more components compared to the previous two, with the balance and finish being the most important among them. The sweetness is rather easy to judge since most wines produced in the world is dry. The level of acidity can be felt by the amount of saliva being produced when swallowing the wine. The theory is that the mouth tries to revert its pH back to what it was before tasting the wine, thus more saliva will be produced the more acidic a wine is. Conversely, the tannin can be felt by the tingling sensation of dryness on the top of the tongue or the back of the lips. Balance is another crucial component where the combination of the structure and the charm of the wine is scored. The aroma component of the palate is just to confirm the assessment with the nose, which is why it does not carry any additional point. The rule of thumb for the finish is: the finish is short if the taste lingers for less than 5 seconds, it's medium if you can still taste it between 5 and 10 seconds, and it's long if longer than 10 seconds.

The most important criteria, shown by the dots on the right-most columns, are given points between 0 and 1 (in 0.25 increments):

• Intensity (Nose): more points the more pronounced the intensity is
• Aroma (Nose): more points the more aroma can be identified (complexity)
• Balance (Palate): more points the more balanced the wine is
• Finish (Palate): more points the longer the finish is

The overall score is then tallied from these criteria:

• 4 points: outstanding
• 3 points: very good
• 2 points: good
• 1 point: acceptable
• 0 point: poor

During the course, I had the opportunity to taste more than 10 different wines. Each time the instructor focused on various didactic topics, such as the effect of aging and food on the taste of wine. The systematic approach shown above, I definitely felt that I could better objectively grade wine, even those that I didn't subjectively liked before. Even more surprisingly, this approach actually taught me how I could appreciate such wines more and widened my horizon in the process.