1. Hold your glass at the stem or the base, so that you don’t warm the wine with your hands or detect any aroma from it. The reason why the wine glass has a stem is to prevent your hand from affecting the temperature of the wine.
2. Look at the colour of the wine. Is the colour clear? Is it bright or cloudy? The colour should be clear and bright, however few wines are fit to drink cloudy, for example the fortified wines like Port or Madeira, where they often leave the sediment to extract more flavour during the maturation process and the result could be cloudy in colour.
3. Tilt the glass to an angle of 45° against a white background and look down through the colour. With this you will find out that there are always two different colours in your wine. One is in the center and the second is at the end of your wine just on the rim. The colour from the center comes from the grape variety, for example if we tilt a glass of Pinot Noir the colour is very pale because the skin of the grape is very thin and they can’t take much colour from it. However if we look at the Cabernet Sauvignon it is very deep and powerful in colour because the skin of the grape is very thick. The rim is the age and evolution of the wine. White wine starts with a light colour during its youth age, and gets darker with time (water white-lemon-gold-amber-brown). For red wines it is just the opposite because it loses the primary colour and tends to gets lighter with time (purple-ruby-garnet-orange-brown).
4. Swirl the glass to increase the aromas into the wine to allow some oxygen. This will help the aromas to open up.
5. Look at the drops running down from the top. From this we can understand the alcohol content and sweetness of the wine. Just remember the more drops or tears you can see around the glass, the higher the alcohol content. Next, look at the speed of the drops or tears. If its runs down fast, the wine will be dry. The opposite is true if it runs down slow, and it means that the wine has sugar residual.
6. Take the wine close to the nose and give a gentle sniff. Does it smell clear? The wine could be faulty with some musty or mouldy flavour. That’s when the wine is corked! If the smell is clear it is indeed a good start!
7. Let’s start to smell the wine. The intensity of the aromas gives you an idea of the quality of the wine. With wine in youth we get primary aromas such as a citrus, fresh fruit and all the aromas relating to the grape variety. When the wine is aged we can get more secondary aromas. These aromas come from the maturation into the barrel, so you could smell something like vanilla, coconut or cinnamon. At the same time the fresh fruit changes into dried fruit plus new aromas such as earthy or animal.
8. The taste of the wine is also very important, have a sip and start to move the wine around your tongue. Remember that we can taste different things in different areas of our tongue. The sweetness is in the front, the acidity on the sides (and it gives you this watery sensation), the bitterness on the back and saltiness in the center. To increase the taste, blow air into your mouth. With this action you vaporize the wine to your nose, so while we taste the wine we will also smell it! It is the opposite of taking some bad medicine, where we close our nose to not taste it!
9. What is you conclusion? Remember the longer the after taste the better is your wine. However the after taste should be everything together, not only the acidity or the tannin. The acidity during the maturation of the wine goes down and the tannin (that is that dry sensation around your gums) gets softer.
10. Enjoy your wine and for any questions, please feel free to e-mail me or visit our website www.diwine.org

Cheers!