Hey Parents! So glad you could make the event tonight. We’ll be covering the basics of how to taste wine by enjoying and discussing three wines together. Of course, if you also ordered food, please snack on it while you taste the wines!

Quick Intro to Latin American Vino

Did you know that wine is made all over Latin America? Or that the first vineyards planted this side of the Atlantic were in Mexico?

The main producers are Argentina and Chile. However, Uruguay, Brazil, and even Bolivia also have wonderful wine regions well worth tasting, and visiting!

Each country has it’s own specialty. However, we stress at Grand Cata that there is so much more behind the well known styles (as great as they are!). Argentina may be known for Malbec, but it also makes wonderful wine from Cabernet Franc, Semillon, Chardonnay, and has lots of different blends, known as “Cortes,” or “cuts.”

Chile is most known for Cabernet Sauvignon, but we love it for the old vines you’ll find there. One of our favorites is Carignan.

While in the “new world,” much of the wine coming from Latin America, especially Chile, has more of an “old-world” vibe to it. This means less emphasis on fruit notes, and more on the secondary and tertiary flavors like herbs and earth. In fact, a good way to differentiate Argentina and Chile is that Argentina has a more “new world” flavor profile, while Chile has a more “old-world” one.

Grapes growing at the foothills of the Andes!

How to Taste Wine

Cata means tastes. This means that we love to really understand how something tastes, why it tastes that way, and what would taste good with it. While we’re talking about wine tonight, our goal at Grand Cata is to explore all the amazing tastes that Latin America has to offer.

If you take one thing away from tonight’s event, it should be that tasting wine and sipping wine are two different things. We like to say that when you take the time to truly taste every few glasses of wine that you have, then the ones you sip will become dramatically more enjoyable over time.

Download this chart if you’d like to take notes on a tablet or after printing it. Otherwise, use it for reference!

The Basics

When tasting wine, you want to appreciate each of the five basic elements: Appearance, Aroma, Flavors, Texture, and Finish. You do so using four senses: Sight, Smell, Taste, and Touch.

The chart above splits wine into four parts. When we taste wine, we progress through these four parts, taking notes either mentally, or in writing. Each of these parts give us clues about the wine, and when we combine everything, we end up with a clear picture of the wine.

Much like learning to appreciate fine art, literature, or music, understanding the basic principles gives us the means to compare one wine to another, to figure out our own tastes, and most importantly, decide where we can push ourselves to find new wine experiences we might have otherwise overlooked.

Tasting Technique

Assess Color and Appearance

Pour around 2 ounces of wine into the glass. Hold the glass directly in front at a 30 degree angle to the ground. Preferably, do so over something white, like printer paper or a table cloth (be careful!). Start by looking directly down the center. Is the wine transparent? To what degree?

Describe the color as best you can. Ruby red, purple, gold, amber, yellow, greenish? Finally, look at the rim. Is it the same color as the center, only lighter? Or is it discernibly different? As an example, an older red wine will often have a brick-orange rim with a red center, an indication of its age.

Ideintify Aromas

Give the wine a light swirl in the glass. If you have trouble with this, hold the stem of the glass where it meets the base as you would a pencil. Put the glass on the nearest sturdy surface and pretend to draw a circle. Start slow!

This will release aromas into the glass and introduce a little bit of oxygen. Hold the glass to your nose and take quick sniffs, not one long inhale, then move the glass away. Pause for a moment and try and identify the first aroma that jumps out to you, in the broadest terms possible. Instead of “I smell green apple,” for example, start with “fruit.” Go in for second set of sniffs, and try to get more specific.

Repeat until you think you’ve got a pretty good idea of how the wine smells, and a small list of aromas.

Describe the “Palate”

One of the things that makes wine special is how it feels. The term we use is “texture,” and it’s both the hardest to pin down, and the most elemental. Some terms that often come up when describing texture are “soft,” “smooth,” “round,” “structured,” “sharp,” “polished,” and “fresh.”

At this point, you also want to pinpoint flavors. Use the list of aromas from earlier as a guide. It turns out that flavor is actually 90% aroma!

Enjoy the finish

Think of the finish as where all the other characteristics coalesce. This part of the wine is the set of sensations you’ll find after swallowing a sip. Whereas on the palate it can be hard to distinguish certain flavors and textures from one another, on the finish they tend to spread out from each other, and you will experience them individually.

However, the finish does have some distinct dimensions of its own. The most cited is "length,” which refers to how long you can taste the wine after a sip. Fine wines often last for significant amounts of time. Another descriptor is “strength,” or “intensity.” Wines that have an intense finish will sometimes give the sensation of being more flavorful after swallowing. Length and intensity do not necessarily go hand-in-hand. It’s common for a wine to finish very strong, but not linger for very long, and vice versa.

Repeat!

Start at the top and enjoy the process! Each time you do this, even with the same wine, something new will pop up, or certain attributes will become clearer. Back to the music analogy, think of it like re-listening to a favorite record!