Wine Basics / Wine Reviews

How to Use the WSET Tasting App

By far, the most helpful thing you can do to improve your knowledge of wine and your tasting abilities, is to document absolutely everything you taste.

I know, that sounds tedious at first, but hear me out.

Keeping track of the wines you’ve tasted has a bunch of benefits:

• You can refer back to your list to see which ones you liked and would want to buy again (or not)
• You can start to pick up on trends when you taste multiple wines with the same grape varietal or wines from a certain region
• You will build the habit of tasting in a consistent manner, which makes it easier to compare wines
• You are forced to really focus on what you are tasting, instead of just letting those thoughts dance out of your head

“I know,” you say, “but that just seems like so much WORK!”

Well let me make it easy for you then! I’m going to introduce you to one of my favourite tasting tools – the WSET Tasting App.

This app is free, super easy to use, and created by the Wine and Spirits Educational Trust, which is responsible for professional wine certification courses around the globe. It uses a their straight-forward tasting method which is taught as part of their Level 2 curriculum, but you don’t have to be a student to use it!

I have been religiously using this app to track all of my wine tastings for the last 6 months and I absolutely love it. It takes only a minute or so to complete for each wine, and now I have a huge library of wines to look back at!

So let me walk you through how to use it. I have the android version but it is also available for iphones.

First, you will want to find it and install it to your device.

Then you will need to register, or sign in through facebook.

Next up you will enter a bit of info to create your user profile. It will ask you if you have any WSET qualifications, but they are not mandatory in order to use the app.

Your screen will start out pretty blank until you are ready to add a tasting.

Once you are ready, click on the “+” button and it will give you two options:

• I know what I’m tasting
• I don’t know what I’m tasting

This is a great feature because you can practice your blind tasting as well!

Let’s start with the easy one though, where we know what we are tasting.

If it’s your first time using the app, it will run you through a quick tutorial as well.

On the first page, you will document the information on the bottle:

• Product Name
• Country
• Region
• Grape(s)
• Producer
• Vintage
• ABV (Alcohol)

Second, we assess the Appearance (if you’ve read my article on how to taste, you will notice that I follow the same order).

You will assess the intensity first, and then the colour. They make it very easy for you to select from a predetermined list.

Third is the Nose. Again you will assess intensity first, and then the aroma characteristics.

When assessing the aroma characteristics, you can simply start typing and it will auto-fill with suggestions from the WSET Tasting Lexicon, but you are also able to fill in your own ideas as well.

It is divided into Primary, Secondary and Tertiary aromas. If you are not familiar with these distinctions yet though, you can always just enter them all under the primary tab. That’s what I did when I was first starting out.

Fourth we have the Palate. Here you will assess the sweetness, acidity, tannin, alcohol, body, and flavour intensity.

On the second page of the Palate second, you will see a similar page to the aromas. For the most part these should be very similar to the ones you noted on the nose, but sometimes there are a few variations.

Finally the Palate section will ask you to assess the finish, which is how long the desirable flavours and sensations lasted in your mouth after the wine was gone. Anything over 30 seconds is long. Anything under 10 is short. If the finish is distinctly undesirable, rank it as short.

The fifth section is all about quality. When I first started out, I just ranked the wines based on how likely I was to buy them again, my personal preference. But there is actually a specific way to determine objective quality.

You should be assessing the wine based on four criteria: balance, length, intensity, and complexity. If it hits the mark in all four, it’s outstanding! If it falls short in every category, it’s poor.

Last but not least, there is an open space for your own additional comments. Here is where I write in my personal tastes, as well as make note of what I paired it with (if anything), what the circumstances were (was I drinking with others or alone? At a restaurant, winery, or home?), and where I bought/price it if I want to get some more.

You can also add a picture of the bottle for reference. If you don’t have the bottle handy, your reference library will fill in that image with the colour you selected earlier.

Once you are done, the Summary page will run you through all of the data you just put in. If you’re sure it’s correct, you can save and exit. You will not be able to edit it again after this point.

Now that I have quite a few tastings under my belt, my homepage looks a little something like this. It’s super easy for me to scroll down to refer back to any of my notes or search for them by name.

If you want to try your hand at a blind tasting, the structure is mostly the same, except you will be skipping over the bottle information at the beginning. You will only be able to enter it after you have completed the rest of the tasting (no cheating!).

From this app you can also visit the WSET website, find course providers, or share your tastings on facebook.

Overall I think that it is a fabulous tool and I do my best to add every wine that I taste into that app so it’s all in one place. I always have my phone with me so it’s nothing extra to carry around, and it’s incredibly efficient.

Want a step by step guide on how to taste wine? Start here.

Then learn my top five tips to improve your tasting skills here.

Give it a try and let me know what you think in the comments!