The Stages of Wine Tasting: Sight, Smell and Taste

The stages of wine tasting are three: sight, where you assess clarity, intensity and colour; smell, where you judge aromatic intensity and the aromas themselves; and taste, where you weigh up sweetness, acidity, tannin, body and finish. Then comes the conclusion: what the wine is and what you make of it.

Why split a tasting into stages?

Because the brain gets distracted. Taste a wine without any order and you'll notice "it's nice" and not much else. Splitting the tasting into stages forces you to focus on one thing at a time and, above all, not to skip any.

Each stage gives you different clues, and together they tell the wine's story: sight speaks of its age, the nose of its grape and its oak, and the palate of its structure and the climate it comes from.

Sight: what the wine tells you before you taste it

At this stage you look at the wine by tilting the glass over a white background. You assess three things:

1. Clarity: clear and bright, or hazy. A hazy wine may have a fault, or may be deliberately unfiltered.
2. Colour intensity: pale, medium or deep. You judge it by whether you can see the background through the wine.
3. Colour or hue: the specific shade.

The vocabulary of colour:

Pay special attention to the rim, where the wine thins out: in young reds it's violet, and with age it turns orange. People also look at the legs, the drops running down the glass, but careful: they tell you about alcohol and sugar, not quality.

Smell: the stage that tells you most

This is the richest stage. Much of what we call flavour actually comes in through the nose, which is why a cold leaves food tasting of nothing.

You smell twice: with the glass still, to catch the lightest aromas, and after swirling, so the wine releases the rest. You assess:

• Aromatic intensity: does it smell faint, medium or pronounced?
• The aromas, grouped into three families by where they come from.

Primary, secondary and tertiary aromas

Not every wine has all three families. An unoaked young white may have only primary aromas, and that's exactly right. Inventing vanilla that isn't there is the classic beginner's mistake.

This is also where you spot faults: a smell of damp cork or wet cardboard, of vinegar, of rotten eggs. If one turns up, the tasting of that wine ends here.

Taste: the structure of the wine

With a small sip that travels all round the mouth, you assess the sensations the wine gives. The five main ones:

1. Sweetness: dry, off-dry or sweet. You notice it on the tip of the tongue.
2. Acidity: it makes your mouth water. It brings freshness; without it, wine feels heavy.
3. Tannin: the drying, grippy feeling on the gums and tongue, mostly in reds. It comes from grape skins and seeds, and from oak.
4. Body: the weight of the wine in the mouth. Light like water or rich like whole milk.
5. Finish or length: how many seconds the flavours last after you spit or swallow.

On top of that there's the retronasal route: with wine in your mouth, draw in a little air and the aromas rise up the back of your nose. New nuances often appear that you didn't catch by smelling.

The taste stage ends with balance: whether everything fits together or something sticks out (burning alcohol, oak smothering the fruit, acidity that turns sharp).

The final stage: drawing conclusions

Many guides stop at three stages, but there's a fourth that makes sense of everything: putting the clues together. Is it young or aged? From a cool climate or a warm one? Which grape fits those aromas and that structure? And, if you're tasting blind, which region and country is it from, and what does it cost?

It's the hardest stage and the most fun. It's also where you learn most, because it forces you to link what you notice to what you know.

What each stage is worth: the Winegang scoresheet

At Winegang, the blind tasting competition, each wine is scored out of 40, stage by stage. The table makes it clear where the hard part is:

Wrong answers don't lose points, so it pays to take a risk on every one. And notice the detail in the smell stage: if a wine has no secondary or tertiary aromas, ticking "none" is what scores. In blind tasting, knowing what isn't there is worth as much as finding what is.

You learn the stages by practising them

Knowing the stages is the map; walking them is something else. The first time it feels like a lot at once, and by the tenth you do it without thinking: look, smell, taste and conclude in a couple of minutes. The quickest way to get there is to taste often and without labels, so each stage forces you to decide. You can start today with the practice tasting, and keep going every month with four wines you didn't choose.

FAQ

Which stage of wine tasting matters most?

Smell gives you the most information: most of what we call flavour actually comes through the nose. But the three stages work together, and taste is what confirms or contradicts what you smelled.

What is a wine tasting sheet?

A sheet with the three stages where you note what you find in each: colour, aromas, sensations in the mouth and a conclusion. It keeps the tasting organised and lets you compare wines afterwards.

Is the aftertaste a stage of wine tasting?

It's part of the taste stage. Retronasal aromas are the ones you pick up with wine in your mouth, as they rise up the back of the nose, and they often add new nuances.