How to Taste Wine – CONFIDENCE – Part 4

Confidence increases with practice

As you probably know from the first three parts of this series, we have now learned how to set up a wine tasting, and how to analyse the wine by sight, smell, and taste. Now, we need to learn how to synthesize these three components so that you can gain an opinion about the wines you are tasting, as well as confidence in your abilities.

Confidence increases with practise, full stop. If you…

• Stay sober
• Spit
• Take notes
• Compare different wines

…you will be able to eventually feel confident about wine tasting.

Taste lots of wines

Doing a tasting with two different wines is really the bare minimum–taste 4 wines, taste 6 wines! If you do this, you will start to see a massive improvement in your confidence a lot quicker than if you’re doing two at a time.

I know what you’re thinking… “I went to a vineyard once with some friends and we tasted six wines and I couldn’t tell the difference, waaaaa.” It’s okay. You were probably at a bachelorette party, you were drunk, you were given six wines made from the same grape harvest, you were definitely not spitting… you can’t judge yourself based on that!

Get 4-8 different types of wine that are from different places and don’t swallow it. I promise, you’ll improve your wine tasting confidence in no time.

PROFESSIONALS DO THIS

As we talked about before, parts of a wine tasting are subjective and other parts are objective. So make yourself comfortable with the vocab sheet and the flavor chart I’ve provided above. These are jumping off points that will really help you fly.

Lastly… make it easy for yourself. Start with the basics and work up from there.

Cheers!