Developing Your Tasting Skills

Some tips on sharpening your wine tasting skills are:

• Make a conscious effort to remember the smells you come across in daily life and give them names. These will form the basis of your tasting vocabulary and are the key to unravelling the elusive smells in wine.
• Try to make tasting part of your everyday life. Whenever you have a glass of wine, take a moment to look at it, smell it and taste it. If you're having the wine with a meal, think about how the wine and food interact. Do they give each other an extra dimension of flavour or does completely override the other?
• Learn the basic fruit flavours and aromas. These are the building blocks of most wines, and it's useful to be familiar with the characteristics of apples, lemons, limes, apricots, peaches and tropical fruits for white wines, and of raspberries, strawberries, blackcurrants, blackberries, cherries and plums for reds.
• Make a habit of getting together with friends to taste and compare wines. With everyone offering their ideas, you'll end up with a much broader view of what a wine is like, and you'll have a great deal of fun in the process! You could start by looking at the differences between two or three grape varieties. As you build your wine tasting skills you could move on to comparing several wines made from the same variety or from one particular region.