Introduction
To judge a wine, you need to use your senses of sight, smell and taste.

Appearance
Clarity can range from brilliant to cloudy.
Intensity of color is easier to judge with two wines side by side.
The color of a wine should be appropriate for its type.
Other observations such as the level of fill, effervescence, tartrates, and "legs" can tell you more about your wine.

Nose
What is the difference between aroma and bouquet?
The condition of the wine can be brought out by swirling your glass.
A corked wine doesn't mean there's cork floating in it.
The intensity of your wine can range from very weak to very pronounced.
When you talk about how fruity or spicy a wine is you're talking about the fruit character.
The Aroma Wheel developed by a professor can help you figure out what you smell in your glass.
The development of the nose refers to its youth or maturity.

Taste
The palate is the least equipped sense in analyzing wine.
Sweetness is the first taste you should try to detect and identify.
Acidity occurs naturally in wine and gives wine its crispness.
Tannin is an organic compound that makes your mouth pucker.
The body can be light, medium, or full.
Practice will help you recognize all the intensity and character of the flavors of your wine.
The Evaluation Chart can show you shortcuts for judging your wine.

Sensory Evaluation of Wine

If evaluating a wine relied solely on what our tongues tell us as it flows over out taste buds, this section might simply be called "Tasting Wine." Judging a wine, however, rests on much more than that. It's critical to evaluate its visual appearance and analyze its bouquet before testing its taste. In fact, we may even be able to determine more about a wine by sight and smell than taste. Tasting and enjoying a wine is sort of like driving a sports car. It's not necessary to know all about the engine and transmission in order to drive. Driving lessons are essential though, and, after all, practice makes perfect.

There are three stages of evaluating a wine that one must go through before making any conclusions about the product: Sight, Smell, and Taste.

The first step is to look at the wine. Inspect its clarity. Once a white wine is bottled it should be clear, bright and trouble-free. Red wines are sometimes expected to throw off some sediment in the botttle. The best way to judge a wine's clarity is by holding it up to a light or against a white background. Dullness or cloudiness may indicate a problem such as the growth of micro-organisms, yeast, or bacteria. Grades of clarity range down from brilliant, starbright, bright, and clear to dull, hazy, and cloudy.

Examine the intensity of color. Hold the glass at an angle against a white background. Look at the rim of the wine. A deeply colored wine at the rim, as opposed to a watery edge, is an indication of body. A more intensely colored wine tends to have more body and a fuller mouthfeel. Judging is more easily done with two wines side by side.

Determine the color of the wine. There is a wide range of colors for red, white and rosé wines. The best thing to remember is that the color should be appropriate for the wine. For example, a young Beaujolais should be purplish, without any tawny or amber hues. Red wines may range from purple to ruby, red, red-brown, mahogany, tawny, to amber-brown. Some white wine grapes have more color phenolic compounds that others. For example,Riesling, is low in coloring agents. Unlike red wines, whites also tend to gain color with age becoming deeper shades of yellow then amber-brown. White wines range from whitish yellow to pale yellow-green, straw yellow, yellow-gold, gold, yellow-brown, to brown. Rosé wine should be just that although some have a distinct orange tint and others have an onion skin hue.

Make other obsrvations about the wine. First off, before the wine is poured from the bottle, check the ullage, the level of fill. A short fill may be the result of cork failure - shrinkage due to dryness or old age - which has allowed for wine leakage or evaporation and could lead to oxidation.

Is it slightly effervescent? Some young off-dry white wines are deliberately bottled with a trace of carbon dioxide in order to make them taste more refreshing. But visible bubbles in older wine, particularly reds, indicates unintentional fermentation in the bottle and is a mistake.

Look for tartrates, which are harmless crystalline precipitates that form from acids that occur naturally during the growing of grapes and as part of the fermentation process. The three predominant acids in wine are tartaric, malic, and citric, all of which are intrinsic to the grape. Tartaric acid is the principal acid in grapes and is a component that promotes a crisp flavor and graceful aging in wine. One of the by-products of tartaric acid is tartrates, also called potassium bitartrate, cream of tartar, and tartar. These small, innocuous crystals can appear in wine unless removed through the cold stabilization process. Tartrates aren't harmful and only impact the wine visually. Cold stabilization is a method of removing tartrates by storing wine at a very low temperature (26° to 32°F) for up to 3 weeks. The flavorless tartrates, which are removed only for aesthetic purposes, fall to the bottom at such cool temperatures, leaving the wine clear. So tartrates in a bottle of wine simply means that the natural level of potassium acid is relatively high and that some time after leaving the winery the wine was chilled enough to cause it to come out of solution and become crystals.

Look for "legs" on the side of your glass. Sometimes referred to as "tears," these are the clear, drop-like lines that form on the inside of the glass after it has been swirled. Legs are an indication of the wine's alcoholic strength. As wine is swirled, alchohol evaporates, concentrating the water that remains, increasint its weight and causing it to drop back into the wine. Some people have believed that legs are an indication of sweetness which is understandable because sweet wines often have higher alcohol than most dry wines.

The "nose" of a wine incorporates the aroma and possibly the bouquet. The terms are different. Aroma refers to the natural grape scent. Bouquet is the complex fragrance that develops in a wine through fermentation and aging, specifically bottle aging.

But before splitting hairs, the first step in smelling a wine is to determine its condition. Swirl the glass so the wine coats the inside and its flavors are exposed and evaporate into the glass. Sniff the wine to identify if it is clean or unclean. Before you smell for any fruit flavors decide if there are any smellable faults. For example, a whiff of vinegar means there is some acetic acid caused by microbiological activity of bacteria and yeast.

"Corked" describes a wine that's been affected by a faulty cork. This characteristic is caused by a chemical compound (2,4,6-Tricloroanisole-246-TCA) that humans can perceive at levels as low as 30 ppt (parts per trillion). High levels of this compound produce an unmistakably putrefying odor and flavor that many compare to that of moldy, wet cardboard or newspapers. There are many degrees of this, however, and an initial smell of cork may dissipate within thirty seconds, not effecting the wine. A wine with small pieces of cork floating is not corked. This is a serving fault, not a wine fault, and the pieces may simply be removed. Wines that have been exposed to air are called oxidized and smell flat. A wine may smell mouldy because of bacterial spoilage. The smell of rotten eggs, high levels of hydrogen sulphide, can be caused by a low level of nitrogen in the grapes or an excess addition of sulphur dioxide to the must shortly before innoculating with yeast. Wine professionals estimate that 3 to 5 percent of wines are ruined because of bad corks, which is why research is proceeding rapidly for an acceptable synthetic cork.

Once you've decided that the wine is OK, turn your thoughts to the intensity of the nose. This could vary from weak to very prounounced. Lesser wines tend to have little in the way of nose. Better wines will have positive grape aromas, obvious oak characteristics or may feature qualities of a mature wine. But to what degree? To make it sinmple, judge the intensity from very weak to weak, medium, pronounced to very pronounced.

Now it's time to find the fruit character in the nose. Some varieties produce their own varietal aromas, but these are not always easy to detect. Gamay, for instance, has an aroma very close to concord grape. Gewurtztraminer is quite unique with its herbal spicy lychee nut aroma. The only way to become familiar with and recognize these aromas is through practice. A useful tool to determine a wine's fruit character is the Aroma Wheel developed by Professor Ann Nobel at the University of California at Davis. For her website click here. For a clearer picture of the Aroma Wheel click here. The Aroma Wheel can guide you through the steps of figuring out what you smell in the glass. For instance, if you say a wine is fruity, well what kind of fruit do you mean? Citrus? Berry? Tropical? Dried? If it's berrry fruit what kind? Strawberry? Blackberry? Raspberry? The Aroma Wheel helps you in this analytical task. If you find that difficult, just start with the broader dategories of fruity, floral, spicy, vegetal, woody, earthy, or nutty.

The development of the nose tells you how old the wine is. Is it young or mature? The age of a wine can be easily judged by an experienced taster. This is not as hard as it may seem. Keep in mind that we're not looking to determine the exact vintage of the wine. Such feats are reserved for the elite few who have years of experience tasting a wide variety of wines. Rather, we are looking more generally to decide upon the stage of development of the wine. Youthful aromas tend to be rather raw and distinct, not having the benefit of time to blend together. Immature or young wines may have obvious, mouth-watering acidity. As wines age, the bouquet becomes more harmonious. The elements soften as they come together. Or you may find the wine is ovver mature with dried fruit and toffee smells.

Up until now, you haven't even tasted the wine and yet you have evaluated many of its important components. This next step should confirm many of the things you discovered while evaluating the appearance and nose. A sip of wine, swirled around the mouth and then spit out is usually enough to judge the tastes. The palate is actually the least equipped of the senses to analyze a wine, providing us with only four basic tastes: Sweet, Sour, Bitter, and Salt, the last of which is not a component of wine. The first map of the tongue shows where most people believe we sense these four elements. The second map leads to a link that disputes this 19th century interpretation of the common map. The traditional tongue map tells us that sweetness is felt on the tip of the tongue. It's actually one of the most fleeting tastes and should be looked for first when evaluating a wine. Acidity, like what we sense when drinking lemonade, is normally felt along the edges of the tongue. Bitterness is usually tasted at the back of the tongue. It tastes like bitter almond and mainly comes from the tannin element of a wine.

click here for link disputing traditional tongue map

First try to detect the dryness or sweetness level of the wine. We say to to this first because as the wine sweeps over your tongue, other elements will hide or seemingly alter the sweetness sensation. Also beware not to judge a wine high in alcohol as sweet. Alcohol coats the mouth and can give a tactile sensation akin to sweetness. A wine may be rated from bone-dry to dry, off-dry, sweet, very sweet, to luscious.

Acidity is an important element of wine. It is naturally occuring in the grapes themselves, although it comes in different forms: citric acid, malic acid, and tartatic acid. Acidity give the wine its crispness, freshness and enables a wine to age. Every wine should have acid in one form or another. Above all, it should be balanced with the other elements.

Tannin gives us that dry, mouth-puckering somewhat disagreeable feeling usually in the back of the mouth but possibly along the gums. Tannin is a naturally occurring organic compund extracted during fermentation from the skins and pips of the grapes. It also comes form the wood of oak casks and barrels, new oak giving the most and/or strongest tanins. Tannin is also essential for long aging of wines and lessens over time.

The body of a wine is determined by the amount or concentration of grape extract and by the level of alcohol. Wines are usually judged as light, medium, or full-bodied. At either end of that spectrum, you could add thin or heavy.

The level of alcohol may be low, medium, or high. It gives a tactile sensation in the mouth. It can be perceived as a soft covering of the tongue or a hot finish on the tongue and/or roof of the mouth.

The flavor intensity and flavor character analyzed much the same way as with the nose of the wine. How is the intensity of flavor? This may range from full to moderate to light to bland or flavorless and maybe even unpleasant. What are the general types of flavors? Fruity? Floral? Spicy? Earthy? Perehaps the flavors are more evident and specific. This is the truly subjective aspect of describing wines because we all detect flavors to varying degrees. The ability to recognize certain aromas and flavors comes with practice.

Persistence or length is the last element in evaluating the taste of a wine. Some wines don't last long at all, perhaps only a few seconds. Some may last 30 seconds to more than a minute. Normally people categorize the finish as short, medium, or long.

Once you have gone through these stages it is time to draw your conclusions. They may be as wide and as varied as our palates are different. Judgements, though, should be based on the many different elements and thier suitabilty for the wine. Generally you should conclude it was very enjoyable, moderately enjoyable, somewhat unpleasant or very unpleasant.

Appearance

Nose

Taste