Everything you need to know to get started in wine
“It surprises me that so many people are forced to attend a tasting. There are things much more difficult than knowing about wine, like learning Chinese or studying law, and yet many people speak Chinese and study law. The wine culture it is, for the non-oenologist, a tight knot of concepts that are entangled in the discourse of the most seasoned palates. Fernando Gurucharri, presides over the Spanish Union of Tasters (UEC), defends a contrary position: according to him, wine is a sensory discourse that anyone who has concerns can access.
He says that the taster “It is made, it is not born,” and compares wine culture to athletics: “Everyone can run a marathon with good training, but you certainly can’t run from the couch.” The terms of the more expert criteria they are only words that define sensations, unraveling the hieroglyph requires more time but, according to Gurucharri, the language of sensations is available to everyone and that is the first step to understanding wine. Its purpose: to learn the tools to find the bottle that makes us enjoy, «You have to start tasting to drink better».
The expert recommends a small initial course to get in touch with the basic concepts of the wine «and thus acquire notions of how the colors arrive, know the grapes and their qualities or how they are going to be treated in the winery. They are – he says – technical concepts, but not inaccessible. The experience will be the next teacher and the knowledge will come from the hand of the tastings. Getting in touch with this microcosm requires just two hours of learning. What is exciting for the president of the UEC is that his teachings never end.
For wine lovers, the best quality of the wines is their convivial function. That’s why those who make the product take pride in creating a substance that exists for the purpose of enjoyment. Buying a wine is the advance of a meeting, its producers play to imagine the moments in which their bottles will put the finishing touch.
It is precisely the company that most enriches the learning process. The president of the UEC advises do not attend a tasting alone, because sharing impressions, nuances and experiences with another person – whether initiated or not – is elementary. The more knowledgeable will offer their background, while the inexperienced will refresh the concepts with their newly released prints.
Uncorking a bottle is the beginning of an experience whose only objective is pleasure, which is why the exercise of drinking is not as important as the exercise of tasting. Before sharing a bottle you have to try a drink and value itKnowing about wines will emphasize the good times.
Basic issues
This exercise, like any learning ritual, must be accessed naked of prejudicesOnly in this way will one come to knowledge. When people taste something predisposed to like it or not, they condition themselves.
You also have to run away from the rushKnowledge requires time, many beginners try to try as many wines as possible in tastings, at this point Gurucharri recommends using common sense: «an expert is not done in a day, if you do not know the world of wine the best it is not to cover too much in a tasting ».
He resorts again to athletics to create a parallel: “When you start running, you don’t do thirty kilometers, you start with three and you work your way up little by little until you gain form, experience and depth.” We must, according to the expert, reflect in order to learn more records and add them to the known ones. The five It is a good companion in the first tasting, with experience you can increase the variety of wines consumed between 10 and 12 wines, no more.
The tasting can be done at home. In this case, one of the details to take into account is the choice of cup, which must be made of very fine and resistant glass. “It conveys freshness and respect for what comes next” and its shape – explains the president of the UEC – leads us to make the wine enter the mouth in one way or another and impress some papillae or others “. The burgundy cup –He points out- it is a good option, because the wines that take longer to express themselves are good for a more open shape, with a greater contact surface with the air.
This must grab by the shaft or by the foot, But never for the chalice so as not to heat the wine. Taking it inappropriately would also prevent us from appreciating the colors and, when we bring the wine to our nose, the aromas will mix and we will be influenced by our perfume and the things we touch. Taking our hands as far as possible we will be able to perceive all the volatile components of the drink, which are what will make up its aromatic expressiveness: the flowers, the spicy or toasted notes of its fermentation in the barrel or the mineral notes. Definitely, it would prevent us from recognizing all the components that help to identify the variety and origin of the drink.
Observe the wine color it is very interesting. In the case of whitesIf we distinguish yellow, pale, straw or greenish tones, we are dealing with a young wine that is in its first or second year and that comes from a colder area. A wine gold It is older, barrel-fermented or a sweet wine. At red the carmine and tile tones are more visible, which indicate that a wine is older. The pinkish It is different, the color varies every year depending on the tone that is worn each season, it is a very versatile wine. It defines a color, not a state of health of the wine.
The turn of the glass allows to distinguish the nuances of the product and its structure and, when doing so, the glass it should never be too crowded. Nor when we drink, because we must prevent the wine from heating up.
La temperature Wine is essential, it is a volatile component and we must take care of it. If they are very high, they favor the release of alcohol over other varietal characteristics of the grape and this makes the wines more ordinary. The president of the UEC recommends forgetting the concept that whites should be drunk cold, insisting that a wine at four degrees is a wine without flavor. He says that the freshness of this type of drink must be given by its own acidity and that we must «go to the 8, 9 or 10 degrees at the operating temperature ». Regarding the red, we must put it at room temperature, but in cold climates because «we must take into account that the term of room temperature it was minted in France at the end of the XNUMXth century. At that time, the rooms were heated with just a fireplace, so the temperature of a red wine must oscillate between the 15 and 17 degrees».
According to Gurucharri, the mistake that is most repeated in people who approach wine is that of the arrogance: «We should not believe that because we have gone to a tasting one day we are great experts, because if we do so we will begin to dogmatize».
Tasting wine is, in short, a exercise of permanent humility, because only by presenting ourselves without prejudice to a bottle, doubting what it hides and taking into account that it is unique in the world, will we taste its wisdom: «bottles are like people: on the outside, we all seem the same, but each individual is unique inside”.
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