It’s easy to appreciate a taste of wine if you just attend to your senses. Because of all things that we drink, wine is perhaps the most sensual. So pour yourself enough to fill a tulip-shaped glass just a quarter full, and let’s go.
Sight
Take a look at the wine in your glass. This works best if you tilt the glass at an angle away from you and look down through the bowl against a white surface such as a table cloth or a piece of paper.
You can tell a lot from a wine’s color. For instance, depth often indicates weight or intensity. For instance, Pinot Noir is typically less powerful than Cabernet Sauvignon. And it looks it.
A wine’s color can also tell you about its age. As a white wine gets older, it changes color from green-tinged straw, to yellow, to gold, to tawny. A red wine develops color from magenta, to ruby, to brick or maroon, to brown-red. If a wine’s label says it is young, but the wine looks old, that’s not good.
Smell
Your sense of smell is crucial to how a wine will taste, so swirl it around in the glass and consider what you find there. Are there aromas of apples or berries; plums or peaches; all sorts of yellow, red or black fruits? Do you find wood, earth or spice?
All of these perfumes and more may come to our noses from wine. And a good, tulip-shaped glass helps trap the aromas that you’re releasing, so that you can better appreciate them.
Not every aroma is a good one and certain scents cane warn you if a wine has gone bad. Aromas of vinegar, a funky cork or too much wood aging are never good signs.
Taste
Now for the fun part. Take a small sip of wine from the glass, slosh it around in your mouth and allow the hundreds of taste receptors all over your tongue do their job.
Wines are sweet, a little sweet or dry (not sweet). They may have tangy acidity. Their tannins—the astringent feeling you get with many red wines, as if a tea bag had been steeped in them for too long—can be harsh, chewy, soft, or not present much at all.
Tastes ought to confirm what you’ve already smelled and can cover an enormous range of flavors.
Feel
It may seem strange to say so, but wine is a tactile beverage, and how it feels in your mouth is a critical part of the tasting experience.
A wine with lively acidity will seem to have an edge while a wine showing low acidity will seem flat or dull. Varying degrees of alcohol, sugar or glycerol will make a wine plump, viscous, round, thin, weak or ephemeral.
The best food and wine combinations, in fact, have a lot to do with tactility. Which wine drinks best with the slippery ooze of an oyster? Which goes with a thick, oily California Viognier? Something like a Syrah-based Rhône would do nicely with a grilled sausage.
Some wines flit through the mouth like spilled poppy seeds. Others roll through, as big and important as Schwarzenegger, and how a wine feels can make or break your experience with it.
Serving Wine
How to open a bottle of Champagne
Opening a bottle of Champagne isn't difficult, but there is an art to it. Remember that while he asked his martinis to be stirred and not shaken, James Bond opened his own bottles of bubbly.
How do you open a bottle of good sparkling wine? First, chill the bottle well—45 minutes in a mix of ice and water. Then strip the bottle of its foil top. Finally, untwist and loosen the wire hood over the cork but don't remove the hood.
Drape the bottle with a cloth, keeping a firm grasp on the cork with your weaker hand. Then, holding the cork stationary and with the bottle at a 45-degree angle, twist the bottle, not the cork, controlling the exit of the cork with the cloth and your weaker hand.
The cork should depart with a whimper, not a bang. Never use a corkscrew or other tool to open a bottle of sparkling wine.
Serving and Storing wine at Home
You don't need to don a tuxedo and hang a silver ashtray around your neck to be the perfect wine server at home. Here are some tips on serving and storing wine so you can appreciate your mealtime wine selections at their peak.
Temperature
Room temperature is generally too warm for red wines; it may cause them to taste harsh. The ideal serving temperature for most reds is 60-65 F.
Achieve this by taking a bottle at room temperature and sticking it in the refrigerator for about half an hour. Light, fruity reds like Beaujolais ought to be colder still, about 55 F. You can achieve this by putting the wine in the refrigerator for two hours or putting it in ice and water for 10 minutes.
Sparkling wines need a lot of chilling: four to five hours in the refrigerator or 45 minutes in icy water. (The cold maintains the carbon dioxide bubbles and makes the wine less dangerous to open.)
Other whites, Sherries and pink wines need two to three hours in the refrigerator or 20 minutes in ice and water while the flavors aromas of Chardonnays show best when served only slightly chilled.
Glassware
The best all-purpose wine glass is a clear one—not cut or etched—with an in-turned rim to enclose and concentrate the wine's aroma. The aromas of a good wine are lost in a glass shaped like a trumpet.
Sparkling wine is best served in flute-shaped glasses, not flat, saucer-like glasses that do little more than dissipate all those bubbles.
Pulling the cork
Many corkscrews (also called wine keys) have Teflon-coated worms that make even the most recalcitrant corks come out easily. If you have a waiter's corkscrew (the sort with one lever and that folds up), be sure that the worm has at least five spirals for better grip. The easy-to-use butterfly or two-armed corkscrew is good for people with weaker wrists.
Aerating red wines
A young red wine can be rough-tasting, and aerating or "breathing" the wine often softens or mellows it. You can do this by pouring the wine into a decanter or into the glassware. Leaving a red wine to aerate with the little aperture of the bottle neck is like refreshing a summer house after a long winter by opening merely the attic window.
Storing open bottles
Store partially filled wine bottles, both white and red, in the refrigerator to retard spoilage. At best, opened bottles may last a week in the fridge. (If you have stand-up room in your freezer, it actually works well to freeze leftover wine bottles.)
The best way to preserve wine that’s been opened is to pour half-filled 750 ml bottles into clean 375 ml bottles from which the corks have been saved.