To the uninitiated, properly tasting wine might look like a snobby ritual, swirling and sniffing before taking a minuscule sip. Be it a bottle of five-dollar grape sauce or a vintage gem that costs as much as an international flight, knowing how to taste wine correctly helps you look like a connoisseur to people who don't know you. Proper tasting enhances the wine's flavor, which makes for a more enjoyable tasting (and drinking) experience for you.
Because a large part of making wine happens to be tasting, and drinking, wine, vintner Molly Meeker of The Meeker Vineyard in Geyserville, CA, is a seasoned taster who can sniff out minute nuances in most bottles of wine. She recently stopped by Zinful for a wine tasting and spoke with the City Paper to identify the easiest ways to elevate your wine-tasting (and drinking) game from novice to knowledgeable in just six steps:
– Don’t try and taste too many wines at a time for the first time
"I limit the number of wines I taste because your tongue gets tired before you get drunk. You have to pace yourself and that’s not just to prevent over indulgence. It’s to keep your tongue in shape to actually discern what you’re tasting. After six or seven tastings, you palate is shot. A lot of people will try and do six or seven wineries in one day when they come to wine country. That’s a huge mistake. Do two wineries, because they’re each going to pour you four to five wines and go have lunch and refresh your palate then go and try one or two more wineries and then have dinner."
– Swirl the wine in your glass
"The point of that is to, as they say, volatilize the esters. When you swirl it, you’re opening up the wine by mixing the wine with oxygen to help release the aroma, or the bouquet. I would say that probably 90% of wine tasting is the smell. Your tongue is limited in flavor to sweet, sour, bitter, salt, et cetera, but your nose is what adds the nuance to the wine."
– Take a sip and then bubble air through the wine:
"Once again, I’m mixing oxygen with the wine in my mouth to help open it up, so that aroma can go up into my nose and add more depth into the flavor."
– Feel what the wine does when it goes from the front to the back of your tongue:
"People say, ‘From the front of the palate, to the mid palate, to the back of the palate.’ Well the palate is your tongue. It’s letting the wine take its time going through."
– Drink the wine you’re tasting:
"I don’t like to spit because I believe that God didn’t intend for the wine to come backward over your tongue. So I drink it."
– Pair the wine you’re drinking with the appropriate food (or pair the food with the wine):
"For a wine-pairing example, let’s say you’re having roast beef for dinner. You have a great bite of rich, fatty roast beef, and then you take a sip of wine. You want that wine to be acidic on the finish to clear the oil from your palate, cleansing it from the beef and setting it back up again so you’re ready for another bite. If the wine is flabby, if it has a high pH, low acid finish, it’s almost cloying, it sticks to your palate. It doesn’t cleanse anything and there’s no difference between that first and second bite of roast beef because you haven’t done anything to perk up your palate in between bites."
Look out for Molly Meeker’s wines, including the Handprint Merlot (recognizable by the painted handprint on each bottle’s front) and the Four Kings, a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot (four royal varieties of grapes), at various wine retail shops and restaurants around the Toledo area. Wine Molly looks forward to returning to Ohio later in 2016 to host a wine dinner or two.
A special thanks to Matt Snyder at Esbar Beverage for setting up this tasting.
The Meeker Vineyard wine tasting, featuring seven different Meeker wines, was held at Zinful's newly opened retail store and tasting boutique at 218 Louisiana Ave., Perrysburg.
