WINE 101,  WINE UNIVERSITY

Wine visual analysis: How to look at wine

The first stage of wine tasting involves the eye and consists of observing the wine. The best way to do that is to hold your glass up against a light box, or against a white background.

A wine’s color can tell you a lot about the wine you’ll be drinking

The color is characterized by its nuance (pale yellow, golden yellow, orange yellow) and its intensity (pale, medium, sustained, dark, deep, intense). Also, the color of a wine always evolves according to its age.

The brilliance of wine, which can be crystalline, shiny, brilliant, matte, dull or off, is indicative of its degree of acidity. A very bright sparkle is often a sign of sustained acidity, especially for a white wine.

This first stage of wine observation is also interested to its clearness (or transparency) and its fluidity (the fluid and movable aspect that the wine shows when the glass is turned).

The disc (circle of wine delimited by the walls of the glass) looks at itself by holding the glass vertically for the white wines and tilting the glass for the red wines. The thickness of the disc indicates its potential of guard: the thicker it is, the greater the guard.
Tears of wine are the drops that come down from the walls of the glass after the wine has been stirred in the glass: the more tears are plentiful, the higher the glycerol / ethanol content. The more tears are slow to flow, the higher the residual sugar content.

So, now you know that you have to admire and appreciate your wine glass for a moment… it’ll make the eventually tasting even more rewarding.

Wine Color Chart

So, there you have it – next time you pour yourself a glass of wine, take a good look, and see if you can correctly guess the wine’s character from its color!

Complete Wine Color Chart retrieved from: https://winefolly.com/review/complete-wine-color-chart/.

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