[MUSIC] Welcome back. In the previous lesson, we considered the first taste. In this lesson, we will move on to the second taste. So, be aware that with that first sip that we take, we are registering basic tastes, sweet, sour, bitter, or sweet, acid, and bitter. So let's spit that out and swirl and take another sip, and now let's focus on what aromatics there are in the wine. These aromatics are retronasal aromatics. In other words, these are the ones that we're going to be smelling while we're exhaling through our nose while wine is in our mouth. Of course you can do that, if you couldn’t do that, how would you breathe? [LAUGH] But, in that exhaling motion aromatics that are in the wine are carried up to your olfactory bulb and your brain tries to figure out what they are. Some of the things that we smelled orthonasally, when the wine was just swirling in the glass in front of us will be carried forth, and we'll smell them retronasally while the wine in on our pallets. Sometimes however, we'll smell all new things, such as riper fruit flavors. Honey-type flavors which aren't that apparent when the wine is simply swirling in the glass. We may notice wood notes or caramel notes or brown-sugary notes. Things that simply don't jump out of the glass at first, but once the wine is on our palate, getting swished around and by the way, warming up more and more and more by our body temperature after all is the high 90s. All of a sudden these aromatics will be released. So, don't ever fail to notice the aromatics once the wine is on our palate. So, we should have a separate place where we are noting those aromatics. So, just to give a quick review of where we are at this point. We've looked at a wine, we've tipped the glass and examine its color in a slightly different way if it's white or if it's red. We've looked for rim variation, we've thought about what's appropriate for that particular wine type to the extent that we know what it is. We've swirled the wine and we've given it a quick sniff to see if the wine is okay, to check the condition of the wine. We've given it a longer swirl and smelled, so that we can pick out the aromatics that are specific to that wine. These aromatics may be specific to the type of grape used. They may be specific to the process used to make the wine. To, they may result from the container that the wine was aged in, such as a barrel. They may result from the way the wine was handled or they may result from other things that were blended into the wine. Then, following that, we're going to take a sip, think about basic tastes, sweet, sour, bitter. And then, take another sip after spitting. And think about what further aromatics on the palate that we taste. Are there any aromatics that confirmed what we smelled initially? Or, are there additional ones? Or, is there a whole new set of them? At that point, we're going to spit. And, writing constantly of anything that occurs to us, and start thinking about the finish of the wine. Finish of the wine is really referring to the persistence of flavor on our palate. How long does that flavor dwell? How long does it stick around? And I'm not talking here about hours or days, I'm talking about seconds or minutes. I have never seen a study that quantifies this exactly but let's just set some time limits. If the flavors in the wine are persisting for a few seconds only, and then, like jumping off a cliff, they're gone, real fast, really quickly, we would call that a short finish. If the flavors persist on our palate after we've spit for several seconds maybe up to a minute, we would say that that wine has a medium finish. If the flavors are persisting longer than a minute up to two or three minutes we would say that the wine has a long finish. These are arbitrary numbers I realize but they refer to, how long these flavors stay with us? It may be that only one flavor or odor in the wine sticks around for a long time. Let's say, the wine is very, very tart. Let's say, the wine almost tastes like we're biting into a lemon. The pain of that sourness might stay with us for a long, long time. I don't consider that a long finish. I would say that, the wine has whatever finish it has, but that the acid flavor persists. Let say that, the wine has such a dominant toasty, oak flavor that I really can't smell anything or taste anything else in the wine. And that sticks around for several minutes. Again, I would say that the wine has short finish, medium finish, whatever it has, with a long persistent oak flavor or oak odor. To be a long finish, to be a complex long finish or even medium finish, I require that two or three or more aromatics persist over that time of several seconds or a minute or several minutes. That's the sign of a complex wine, of an interesting wine. Rather than a wine that just has one glaring, sort of monolithic standout flavor. Either way, I'm not making the judgement here. I want to note in my notes, what was that flavor that persisted. If a medley of flavors persisted, if the wine is complex and they persist for a couple of minutes and we'll be tasting wines like that. Then I would say that, the wine has a long finish. Its not inherently good or bad, whether wine has a short or medium or long finish. This is merely information that we're recording as intelligent tasters, so that we can compare and contrast that wine with others wines that we've had, with other wines of that type, with other wines of different types. In this lesson, we considered the second taste. In our next lesson, we will address wine texture.
