Top wine tasting tips – Maximising the nose

One should use all your senses to taste and enjoy wine.    For instance, just hearing the cork pop out of the bottle begins to excite me.   The next stage is to look at the wine and I have sometimes known I am going to reject  a wine back just by looking at it and conversely have really appreciated the beautiful colour of say a Chateauneuf du Pape.  However, probably the most important stage in understanding wine is smelling or sniffing the wine and getting the nose, aroma or bouquet.  Important in this stage of tasting is to ensure that you use a proper tasting  glass where the top of the glass has a smaller circumference than lower down eg the traditional tulip shape.  Also don’t overfill the glass – one twentieth of a bottle is  enough.  For white wines over chilling can hide the nose so you might want to warm the glass a little in your hands; the same might be appropriate for red wines that have not yet come up to room temperature.  Most connoisseurs start by just by sticking their nose in the glass as this will tell you the strength of the aroma and then agitate the wine by swirling it around the glass to maximise the aroma.  However, here is my “Top Tip”; at this stage you might still not have got a really good aroma out of the wine.  This may be due to a poor glass, a tired or unsensitive nose or just a wine that has little bouquet.  In cases like this put your hand tightly over the top of the glass for 10 seconds and swirl a little. After the 10 seconds bring the wine up to your nose but keep your hand tightly over the glass.  Then remove your hand, stick your nose into the glass and inhale through your nose.   Try this at home, it is amazing how it really maximises the nose!