[MUSIC] In many of the tastings we do, we might have a flight of several wines of the same type, of the same color, of the same grape variety in front of us. But for today just for practice we have our simple white, which we just tasted and our simple red and we shouldn't ever forget to rinse in between. I'm going to taste a lot of wines. I might want to have a bucket nearby to dump this in to. But for now I'm fine. So pick up your red glass. The steps that we go through for red wine tasting is the same as white. But in a couple of areas, there are separate things we want to look for. So the first thing we do is, what? Our visual evaluation, right? So since reds are darker, they are more dense, they are more difficult to see through, I could hold this up and see if I can actually see through that wine, and I can't. So I may want to hold it down with my white paper in the background, and see if I can see through it. Sometimes in a real critical tasting, I'll actually bring a little flashlight with me, and then I can shine that flashlight through the wine, and really get a good idea if it's clear. This particular glass of wine that I have is crystal clear, it's absolutely clear, as clear as clear can get. But sometimes, a wine will look clear and when I shine my little high beam flashlight through it, it will look hazy. All of a sudden they'll look like my head light shining through the fog. In this case though, however this wine is very very clear. So, I'll make a note clear. Then I'm going to look at the color. Now with red wines, there's a little bit more to look for. Obviously there's more color there but I'm going to tip the glass at a 45 degree angle against my white background and I'm going to look around the thin part, the rim of the liquid that I'm tilting out. And I'm also going to look through thicker part of liquid, we call that the core. As red wine ages, it starts to pick up a little bit of a brown color and by tilting the glass I can see that brown color more readily around the rim. I can't see it through the core. The core of this wine still looks like a ruby red, a medium ruby red color. But if this wine were older, I would see a little brown around the edge. We call this rim variation, when the rim is a different color than the core. In the case this particular wine that I have in front of me, I think it's a pretty young wine because I see no rim variation. The intensity of the color is less around the rim because more light is getting through. But there's no difference in hue, there's no difference in basic color. So don't forget to right notes about what we've just seen and then pick the glass up. And give it a quick sniff, remember we're just testing the condition of the wine now. Is this wine servable? Is this wine safe to proceed or do I need to call for another bottle? Nope, the wine is fine. So let's go ahead and proceed, and just as with the white wine, we're going to swirl, swirl, swirl. And then it takes some longer sniffs and proceed to describe the nodes of the wine. I won't go into it extensively but the things you might look would be berry notes or fruit notes, right fruit notes, black fruit, red fruit, spiciness, woodiness and so forth. I'm going to take another little sniff of this wine just to make sure I didn't miss anything. And then, I'm going to go ahead and take my first sip. Remember, that first sip, is just to us ascertain basic taste. Sweetness, sourness, bitterness. But now since we have a red wine in our hand, bitterness is a little bit more interesting thing to look for. So first of all sweetness. Is this wine sweet? No, this wine is dry, no sweetness. What about sourness or acidity? It's medium, or it's adequate, it's not sticking out. It's just fine, it's balanced. What about bitterness? Yes, there's a little bit of bitterness in this red wine. But I have to think back on my experience with red wine. Is this bitter because it's the first red wine I've had today? The first red wine I've tasted? And I'm comparing it to the white wine I just tasted. Well, of course it is bitter comparatively but in the world of red wines, this is a fairly mild wine. It's not very bitter. I would say that the bitter is in balance with everything else in the wine. So I would make note of that. And then I would go ahead and take another sip. And remember on our second sip, what we're looking for. We're going to move the wine around in our mouth a little more. We're going to gargle it. Maybe pull a little bit of air in and we're going to think about what we are smelling retronasaly while wine is on our palate. That's really interesting. There were a lot of things to be smelled while the wine was in the glass and we were just sniffing and swirling and so forth. But actually on our palate, the wine sort of suddenly warms up a little bit. And different things jump out of the solution. I got a more of a ripe fruit smell, riper than the smells that I smelled originally. Almost a fruit jam type of smell. And also there's a peppery note that wasn't there by nose, so it's actually a lovely little wine. But I would take notes on everything that I just perceived. And then as I'm sitting here taking notes I'm also thinking about how long that flavor is lasting on my palate? How long is the finish of this wine? Compared to that white wine which was fairly short, this wine is more of a medium finish, maybe medium plus. I've been standing here talking for a minute or so and I can still have a pretty full memory of what that wine tasted like while it was on my palate. So I would say a medium finish, medium, or medium plus. If the finish were to persist for several minutes, then I would call the long finish. What about the body of these two wines? Let's think back on the white wine that we tested first that had a very short finish. While I was flipping that around on my palate, it's seemed a little bit light. Kind of on the watery side and so I would call that white wine body light or light plus. The red wine on the other hand, seems like it's a little more alcohol. A little bit more heft, a little bit more consistency. So I would call that a medium body or maybe a medium minus. Since we only really have three descriptive parameters for body or weight in wine, namely light, medium and full, I tend to use pluses or minuses. Like plus, medium minus, medium medium plus, medium plus plus and so forth. So feel free to sort of split the differences among those various categories so that you can fine tune your assessment of the wine. So I think that's a pretty good practice to get you through the ritual, the mechanics of wine tasting, looking at it, giving a quick sniff, and then more profound sniff. Taking an initial taste on your palate and then a follow up taste on your palate thinking about what aromatics you perceive while the wine is on your palate. And then thinking about how the wine sort of lingers in your tasting memory for seconds or minutes or beyond. Good job on our first tasting. Think about all the things that we covered in this module. We've talked about wine styles, we've talked about the tasting setup, the tools and the elements that you need to conduct the proper tasting. The main thing is to find a clean well lighted place. A place where you can sit without distraction, kind of a restricted noise in the room and focus on what's in the glass. So, and we've actually talked about the glasses that you should grab and buy. We've talked about a couple of wines to get us started. And what I'd like to ask you to do is to find your closures for this two bottles. And let's go ahead and re-cork the wines, so to speak and save them for future modules. We'll be able to use these subsequently. We'll be able to use them later in the class after they've been sitting partial for a while and we start to look at possible aromatic faults in wines because as they sit partial, they'll begin to become oxidized. So don't toss the rest out and save it for future lessons.
