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short term wine storage Sender: Ian Salut-Hi Liam, le-on Fri, 04 Feb 2005 00:47:00 GMT, tu disais-you said:- If you saw my remarks about a cheese and wine tasting, you'll see that I feel that it is essential to have decent glbuttes to drink good wine. And of course the temperature at which you serve wine makes a huge difference to your perception of a wine. As general advice, serve a wine a few degrees too cold (note I'm NOT, repeat NOT saying that you should serve them all freezing) and see how it comes into focus as it warms up. I don't go so far as to say that you need 15 different expensive Riedel glbuttes to be able to enjoy your wine. I'd suggest that an INAO shaped glbutt is excellent when tasting to judge a wine, as it gives a reference. When it comes to drinking, I'd suggest that two basic shapes will do, not TOO huge, (the Sommelier range is an specialised analytical tool, IMO) one for Cabernet Sauvignon types and the other for Pinot Noir types. The INAO will do for all whites except your top white burgundies (Chardonnays) and you could serve these in a cab sauv red glbutt that is decently sized without being huge. If you wanted to get - in the same range - a couple of other shaped glbuttes to see how the same wine shows in different glbuttes, there would be no harm, but I suspect you'll find that two plus the INAO will do fine. As for techniques in tasting. Remember that tasting is quite different to drinking. Tasting is primarily to analyse the wine, trying to see whether it has faults, what the balance is going to be like, if it's age-worthy and so on. Although lots of us here have got into a (bad?) habit of drinking wine almost as if we were tasting it, drinking should, IMO be primarily for pleasure. OK, with that preamble out of the way. Some facts. In your mouth, divorced from ANY sense of smell, we can taste salt, sweet sour and bitter. Some have added "hot" (as in chillies) and "tasty". But if you lost all sense of smell, that's all you'd get. So although therefore you should try to get the wine to all parts of the mouth to get as much taste as possible, the most important sense we use when tasting and drinking wine is smell. So the "tasting" techniques used for wine are designed to get as good a smell as possible. What I do (everyone will vary) (after looking at the colour and smelling alone) is to take a good sip, chew it around my mouth, and then cup my tongue to try to get the wine pooled there. I then pull air in over that pool, making a kind of sucking action, and trying not to inhale excess wine. This frees lots of aromas from the surface as the wine is warmed by my mouth, and sucking, gets these aromas where I want then, at the back of my mouth. I then exhale the air through my nose, so that the aromas get there too. I normally don't need to do that more than a couple of times to allow me to begin to analyse the component smells. You may find you need less, or more tastes. Finally, when I'm tasting seriously, I spit out the wine, exzpelling it in a thin stream with my tongue through pursed lips. I may then smalck my lips (and mouth metophorically) to get the aftertaste. Spitting is an integral part of serious tasting. Alcohol has the capacity of desensitizing your palate, so if you drink down 3-4 tasting samples, you've destroyed your capacity to analyse accurately. Hope all that helps a bit. (Don't bother, better spend the money on wine!) -- All the Best Ian Hoare mailbox full to avoid spam. try me at website
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