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.