How to look like an expert when drinking wine

One of the simplest trick to look like an expert when it comes to wine drinking, is to GO SLOW. I would think it is a dead giveaway that a person is not a wine drinker is the way one drinks. Wine is meant to be appreciate, not guzzled down like beer, nor gulped down in one shot like tequila shots.

How to hold your wine glass
I would not say there is definitely one correct way of holding. What I do recommend here is such that one can avoid looking like a klutz from the way one holds his wine glass. The recommended way to hold the wine glass is to hold it by its stem the way we would hold our hand phone when smsing. If we were to hold it by its body, our hand temperature could heat up the wine too much, thus affecting the taste of the wine. How the wine taste could be affected by the temperature, different temperature can bring out different taste of the wine.

Way to swirl the wine
Purpose of swirling the wine is to introduce air into the wine, such that the flavor of the wine would be brought out. Swirl the wine means to rotate the wine glass horizontally parallel to the table or ground. Holding the glass by the stem to rotate could be a bit challenging for beginners. One suggestion is to place it on a table and swirl the wine glass comfortably by resting your wrist on the table. There is no need to swirl it violently, gentle to moderate will do.

Sight
Tilt the wine glass about 30 degrees, hold it up against preferably white lighting and observe its color. Alternatively, hold a piece of white paper beneath the wine glass and notice the color of the reflection. For white wines, notice how ‘yellow’ the wine is. The correct ‘terminology’ for the color I would use is straw. Whites in general can vary from very pale straw to straw color. For reds, notice how deep the red is, whether you can ’see’ through the liquid as you tilt the glass. The color of the wine is an indication of how strong the taste of the wine is, straw is likely to taste stronger in flavor compared to pale straw. This could a bit challenging when the lighting is yellow or background is dark, the color of wine we see will be affected by our surrounding lighting.

Smell
This is like a preview to how the wine will taste when you drink it. Note that there is no 100% guarantee that a wine will taste like what it smells like. Swirl for a few seconds, bring the mouth of the wine glass close to your nose, take a deep breath. To get a better whiff, open up your mouth slightly, this will make the smell go straight to your throat, and you will get a better sense of smell this way. This method is taught by a friend of mine who used to work in a vineyard in Yarra Valley, Australia.

Taste
Take a sip, about one-third of a mouthful will be good. Some people would like to suck in air while they hold the wine in their mouth to introduce more air to oxidize the wine. Spread the liquid in your mouth, across different parts of your tongue(because different parts of tongue catches different flavours). Associate the taste of the wine reminds you of which type of fruits, food etc. This is one of the easier way to identify the word to describe the wine, rather than sprout fanciful wine vocab which most probably does not make sense to many people. After swallowing, wait for the aftertaste. Aftertaste refers to the taste you catch at the back of your tongue after swallowing the wine. It can be dry (like certain chinese tea), or rough like sandpaper, not much of an after taste(this is indication of easy drinking wine).

Combining pointers from above, one can quickly resemble someone who has taken wine before and can appreciate wine to a certain degree.

How I started on wine appreciation

Hi there,

Here is a short introduction about myself on how I started out wine drinking and appreciating it.

After graduating and coming out into the society to work, I started off with drinking beer originally. One of the reasons prompted me drinking is curiosity. Curious about how alcohol taste, from watching shows where adults would hang out after work in pubs and guzzle drinks late into the night. Thought it was quite cool at that point in time. And the main reason for choice of beer is due to low alcohol content and of course the affordability. For those who are aware, alcohol in Singapore is highly taxed and it is not cheap to drink alcohol here.

Naturally as a female, one of the concerns of this particular species of human being is that we spend part of our brain cells worrying about our figure! After a few months of guzzling beer after stressful day of work, I started putting on some weight, and to make things worse, the weight accumulated at the middle portion of my body!

This is when I started cracking brains on finding the alternative to drinking beer, and that is when I found wine. It is somewhat like a progressive step (incremental increase in alcohol content). Not to mention that wine drinking is definitely more ‘classy’ compared to drinking beer. At the mention of beer drinking, there were times that the image of uncles sitting at coffee shops in the neighborhood at tables lined up with numerous bottles of Tiger and Guinness. Definitely not the kind of image I would want to portray to my colleagues.

Wine tasting back in year 2005 in Singapore is starting to become more popular with the young working crowd. In bid to attract more wine drinkers, upcoming wine bars and shops do offer rather attractive offers for their customers. Few of the places I started off with is vino vino wine lounge opposite Mohd Sultan, Wine network at Dempsy road, Wine Garage beside Brewerkz at Riverside Point. I got decent wine tasting experience with paying $10-$20 for a variety of 5-10 types of wine across different countries in the world. It's a pity that tastings are more expensive these days with inflation hitting high at more than 8% recently. However, I'm seeing some really good offers for wine dining, companies offering food and wine. I have yet to have the opportunity and budget to go for those at this moment.

I also visited some wineries at Yarra Valley, Australia. From there, I made a friend who works in winery and shared with me some valuable tips in wine tasting and appreciation. It is through this blog I hope to go through this journey I have in learning about wine and appreciating wine, and share my experience with my readers.