Why Descriptive Tasting?
Wine tasting can be a pretentious activity and can also, for many people, have an air of snobbery about it. This is a shame because descriptive tasting of wines is not only a method of quality assessment, but can also be a lot of fun. The components which make up wine must be identified and assessed if someone is to reasonably compare one wine with another, or to relate to another person what a particular wine was like (describing a wine to someone as “nice” doesn’t tell them anything about the wine except that you personally found it pleasant). Therefore, wine tasting involves describing and assessing the various aspects of wines. In describing taste, we must describe characteristics such as sweetness, bitterness, acidity and the aromas/flavours we associate with that taste with reference to those that we already know of (e.g. fruits, flowers). What does a lime taste like? Well, it is acidic and perhaps closest to a lemon in flavour. It is impossible to say without making reference to
