Photo by CORBIS
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Days of Wine and Noses
By Tony Hendra, January-February 2003
A sip is just a sip—but the true connoisseur knows how to tell a so-so vintage from a really great one. Join the fun
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Before there was wine, there was beer—maybe as early as 12,000 years
ago. The conventional wisdom that civilization began with hunter-gatherers
putting down roots to raise crops is challenged by some respected
paleontologists. They argue that the real reason for staying in one place was
to give grain a chance to ferment into beer. (Really. I'm not making this
up.) Wine isn't recorded until the seventh millennium B.C.E., with the now
settled and sophisticated gentlemen farmers looking for a more refined way of
inducing a buzz than with suds.
Nine thousand years on, that issue hasn't gone away. Wine is still
classier than beer and therefore just a tad intimidating. Remember
Cheers? Whenever anyone ordered wine the place went v-e-r-y quiet.
If you consider yourself a wine novice—and by that I mean someone who
enjoys an occasional glass but gets a little uncomfortable when the cork
isn't, well, a screw top—I'm going to let you in on a secret.
There are good wines and not-so-good wines, but the golden rule is this: Good
wine is wine you like. Wine is the most subjective aesthetic pleasure in the
world. It has to go into your mouth before you can form an opinion about it,
and no one can contradict you.
The following eight steps are all you need to take you from neophyte to
vino-phile:
1. Open. Strip off the capsule (fancy for foil), insert the
cork-screw into the cork, and screw away. All the way in, please, or you might
break the cork trying to pull it out. Watch for: a cork that slides out
easily—it's probably rotted, and the wine spoiled by air getting in.
Pour some. If it smells vinegary or cooked or musty like damp lumber, give it
to the cat. (Dogs, in my experience, being the kind of drinkers who prefer
beer.)
2. Pour. Fill the glass just less than half full—it is not good
form to fill it to the brim or even to within an inch of the brim. And the
glass matters. My old mum, like many people, believes that the more stuff on a
wineglass—cut glass, colored baubles on the base, fake gold or silver
bands, nymphs cavorting on the sides, etc.—the better the wineglass.
Wrong. What you need is a clear ovoid bowl at least 10 to 12 ounces in capacity
on a simple three- to four-inch stem. Watch for: How you hold it. You
should grasp it by the stem at almost all times so as not to affect the
temperature of the wine. Also, doing this is more elegant. Fists are for
beer.
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3. Ogle. Tilt the wineglass sideways (by the stem, of course),
holding it near something white—the tablecloth, your dress, your boxers,
the whitewalls on your '55 Chevy, whatever. The color should be pure and
clear, ruby through purple for red wine, and lemony through straw for white.
Watch for: a white wine with light-brown tinges or a red wine that's
bricky-brown. Wines like these are known among the cognoscenti (a group that
now includes you) as "dead."
4. Swirl. Holding the base of the wineglass on something slippery
like the cover of a menu, swish the wine gently about an inch below the brim.
Takes a little practice, but the move will win you admiring glances in even the
snootiest dives. This aerates the wine, releases its aromas, and prepares it
for the next step. Watch for: trouble, as in spilling the contents all
over your new clothes.
5. Sniff. Insert one or both nostrils as far into the glass as you
can. Now sniff. You should get a nice little bouquet of scents. You may detect
fruits and flowers as well as nuts, chocolate, coffee, tobacco, leather, cooked
meat, vanilla, and more. Watch for: no scent. This can mean (a) the wine
stinks, (b) the wine is too cold, or (c) you've lost your sense of
smell—any of which is a problem.
6. Savor. Now sip just an ounce or two, and work it around gently
inside your cheeks with your tongue. Pros call this "chewing" and, in
fact, if you do sort of chew the wine, it will release more aromas up into your
olfactory system (AKA nostrils). Why all this fuss? Because aromas are 90
percent of taste; the tongue itself recognizes only four flavors—salty,
sweet, acid, and bitter. But your tongue matters. If it detects a puckery
bitterness in a red wine from the tannin in the grape skins, the wine's too
"young" (hasn't aged in the bottle long enough). If it detects
too much acidity in a white wine, or none at all, you won't enjoy the next
taste
7. Swallow. If everything has gone well until now, swallow slowly. A
good wine will linger on your taste buds for several seconds, and it's a
fine farewell. This is called the "finish," and the longer, the
better.
8. Encore! Repeat steps 1 through 7 until bottle is completely
empty.
Tony Hendra writes about wine for New York magazine.
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