Wine Basics

A Wine Baby’s Top 5 Tips to get better at Tasting

When it comes to wine, you know what you like and what you don’t, but do you know why?

When someone asks what your wine tastes like, do you shrug your shoulders and say “I dunno, it tastes like wine”?

For a lot of us who are just casual wine drinkers, we’ve never had to put much thought into the different flavours, aromas, and components of wine that make us either want another glass, or want to pour it out.

But being able to break down and analyse that delicious liquid will help you not only be able to describe the wine to others, but also help you figure out which new wines you might like to try, or avoid.

The best part is, improving your tasting skills can be as easy or as challenging as you want. And since this is a wine blog for beginners, I’m going to break down my top tips for when you are just getting started.

Do you need to learn how to taste wine first? Don’t skip A Wine Baby’s Guide: How to Taste Wine.

1. Trick your brain

This one is a super simple tip, with no additional research or resources required.

The next time you are sniffing around a wine glass for those aromas, close your eyes.

Our brains aren’t great at separating the different messages they are receiving from all of our different senses simultaneously. It doesn’t have time for that! So instead, it mushes all that data together to give you quick answers.

So when you’re looking at a red wine and trying to figure out what you smell, your brain is going to take that information from your eyes and say “it’s red wine, duh”.

But if you block out that visual interference and focus solely on asking your nose what it smells, it can open up a whole world of aroma possibilities that your brain previously ruled out.

Ask yourself “what’s that smell?” instead of “what does this wine smell like?”

NEXT LEVEL: If you really want to remove competing information from your brain, try a blind tasting! Have your bottles wrapped in paper bags or foil to hide the label entirely, so you can’t rely on any information you might have about the grape varietal. It’s also a fun excuse to have a party, so everyone can bring their own mystery bottle to share!

We do this at our monthly wine tasting club. Learn how to host your own: Start Your Own Wine Tasting Club!

2. Start broad

When reading wine reviews, you might come across a sentence that reads like this “aromas include hints of fresh mowed grass with morning dew”. But you don’t need to be this exact when you are starting out.

It’s much easier to start out by identifying the overall themes of the aromas, and then you can narrow down from there as you improve.

This also saves you from having to memorize a lengthy lexicon of wine aromas.

To do this, you need to know only a few different categories to start:

• citrus fruits (lemons, limes, grapefruit…)
• stone/orchard fruits (peaches, pears, apples, apricots…)
• tropical fruit (bananas, pineapples, mangos, guavas…)
• floral (blossoms, jasmine, roses, violets…)
• red fruit (strawberries, raspberries, cherries, rhubarbs…)
• black fruit (blackberries, blueberries, plums, blackcurrants…)
• green notes (green bell pepper, grass, asparagus…)
• other (vanilla, cloves, baking spices, honey, petrol… this category could go on forever…)

When you are first trying to get better at picking out aromas, focus first on which category is most prominent in the wine. If you can pick out specific fruits and aromas, great! But if you can’t that’s fine too. No one is judging you.

Often there will be more than one category expressed in the same wine, but start with what’s most obvious and work your way out from there. I like to try to pick out three to five aromas for each wine.

When you are ready to add another layer to your descriptions, start asking yourself clarifying questions to really nail down what you are experiencing.

For example, let’s say you smell strawberries. Are they fresh? Maybe they are over or under ripe? Have they been made into jam? Or maybe it smells more artificial, like strawberry jolly ranchers?

The more you practice, the better you will get at the specifics.

3. Use references

If you’re really lost, there are no rules that say you can’t use references. It’s not a closed book test!

Some great tools are to use an aroma wheel or list to refer back to (kind of like the examples in the categories above). Wine Folly has some for purchase, the WSET Level 2 certification provides their own lexicon, or you can find free apps online or compile your own!

I would recommend that you try to pick out what you can on your own first, but when you’re feeling stuck, give that wheel/list/lexicon a look and see what else you can find.

Another option is to find the winemaker’s tasting notes (or other professional wine reviewer’s) online for the specific wine you are drinking. See if you can pick out the same things they did!

Side note: if your answers are different than the winemaker’s or reviewer’s, it doesn’t mean you are wrong. We all taste and smell differently, and have different taste/smell libraries in our brains to pull from. Their descriptions are just a good reference point to refer back to.

4. Document your practice

One of the tips that I have found to make the biggest impact in my tasting so far is to document all of my tastings.

In the beginning, I would swirl-sniff-sip, think about it for 30 seconds, and then let those thoughts go completely out the window. But now that I document every tasting, it forces me to concentrate a lot harder, which helps me commit it to memory for next time.

Okay, not *every* tasting. Sometimes I just drink for fun, too.

In addition to increasing your focus on the task at hand, it also serves as a great reference list when you are trying to remember if you actually enjoyed that bottle of Sauvignon Blanc you had last summer.

With today’s technology there are lots of different ways to do this. You can go old school and keep a small notebook just for tastings, you can keep a running list in your notes app on your smartphone, or you can use an app.

My two favourites are “the old school” and “the app”. I use the WSET tasting notes app on my phone most of the time because it’s quick, easy, and standardized. It also makes it very easy to search for previous wines.

If I’m at a winery, however, I prefer to go old school and write by hand. First off, because I can add in additional notes about the winery or winemaking process without having to navigate through the app for the right section. Secondly because I think it’s rude to spend your entire time at a winery staring at your phone. It’s a beautiful place, look around! I just enter the wines into the app later.

Want a super easy place to start? I’ve created a *FREE* Guided Wine Tasting Sheet. I’ve designed it specifically for “wine babies”, to walk you through all the steps of tasting AND has a small aromas lexicon built into it. Subscribe here to snag yours!

5. Build your aroma library

For this one, I’m referring to smells, not books.

My biggest struggle when it came to improving my tasting was that I have a terrible sense of smell and therefore don’t know what a lot of things smell like! How do I know if a wine smells like cloves when I have no idea what cloves smell like??

There are two ways to do this.

The cheap and easy way is to just start smelling more things, with intention. Stop and smell the roses, literally. Smell all the food you eat and see if you can separate the different components (the meat, the veggies, the spices, etc). Sniff fruits you don’t normally eat at the grocery store (if that’s appropriate – I’m writing this during the Covid-19 Pandemic so it wouldn’t be a great idea right now).

The more expensive, but more reliable way, is to invest in an aroma kit. These are collections of vials that contain all kinds of different scents that you can refer back to time and time again. They last for years, and they are a great way to familiarize yourself with smells you wouldn’t normally be exposed to.

Personally, I use the Le Nez Du Vin master kit but there are smaller options and other brands available. I did a lot of research before this purchase though, and I can say with certainty that this brand is the gold standard and absolutely worth the price.

Read more about it here: The BEST Way to Train your Nose

(click the image below to shop Amazon!)

I hope you will give these tips a try and let me know how they helped in the comments!