The Art & Language of Wine Tasting

THE ART & LANGUAGE OF WINE TASTING, by Rob Geddes MW & the Wine Odyssey Sommelier Team

Describing taste from the bottle to the brain and into words is a huge task. Most activities have their own language and while the language of tasting is inside us all,
it is knowledge of the techniques and traditions of tasting that makes for a taster’s skill. Learning the lingo and techniques is part of the process of understanding wine.

Primarily it is our DNA and culture that dictates each tasting experience. Our DNA via gene expression controls smell and taste, the number of taste buds we have and if all our aroma genes are switched on. Culture means Durian fruit is reviled in many places but loved in others and Americans don’t eat passion fruit so describing a wine in those terms means nothing to residents on the North American continent.

As we differ so much in our ability to detect aroma and flavour, tasting with others is a vital part of learning, particularly as wine has a strong oral tradition. There is no substitute for tasting and talking about the same wine with a group. Unleash your curiosity and ask questions, that’s how we all learn!

Approaching a tasting for the first time can be daunting. Plan on writing notes and spit everything! Remember that it’s about what you like, so speak up about what you like and why. Whatever system you use to rate a wine, remember the discipline of scoring wine encourages you to form an opinion and gives you a quick overview and a useful insight later into what you thought. Also getting into the habit of examining at your wine in the same order can assist in helping you not miss anything: appearance (colour), then aroma (smell) and then palate (taste).

Most tastings are not formal, everyone is standing around tasting the wine. This setting is easy to cruise in and out of. The best consumer tastings for unlocking the meaning of wine, though, is a seated affair, with a period of time to allow note taking before a discussion of the wines is led by a knowledgeable expert. These tastings are great fun, part philosophy, part autobiography, and part weather report, mixed with a lot of humour. They allow for the transmission of the subtleties of wine as great winemaking is not technical but about observation, timing and care.

A series or group of wine to be tasted is often called a flight. I have no idea why this term was given, but a number of ways to conduct a flight tasting are: blind, horizontal, vertical and vertizontal.

Blind tasting is a cornerstone process, much loved by the Australian wine industry for assessing wine quality with the terms of reference relating to the vintage, variety or style of the wines under examination. You are given no clues, just a bottle in a bag or, better still, a single glass and the chance to divine the contents and describe them as closely as possible.

A Horizontal tasting refers to a common feature among the wines being tasted, such as different wines from the same vintage. This allows the quality of different properties to be measured with the possible varieties compared.

A Vertical tasting is a comparison tasting of different, often succeeding years of the same wine to reveal differences in the vintages.

A Vertizontal tasting includes wines from different producers of the same variety across different years. It provides a rare opportunity to taste a wide cross section of wines generally from a common district.

It has occurred to me in the many tastings I have attended over the years that many people, and even wine shows, look for similarities in their wines when tasting, whereas I think maybe we should be looking for and celebrating the differences in the wines we taste!


For more details about the words that are used in the wonderful world of wine, check out the Wine Odyssey Wine Glossary.

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