Welcome Wine Lovers!
Drinkwine.com provides the wine enthusiast with an educational and enjoyable resource. Be on the lookout for new and exciting developments at DrinkWine.com! Cheers!
Wine Tasting - The Sense of Sight
Wine tasting basics begin with knowing how to use your senses to understand, interpret, and enjoy the wine. The ability to recognize what you see, and furthermore describe it in clear terms, is a very important wine tasting skill.
Although some may say the appearance of the wine is the least important aspect with regard to the senses, it is still worth noting. When examining appearance, we are looking for clarity and color. We want the wine to be free of any sediment, leaving it clear and brilliant. Red wines tend to lose their color as they mature, while white wines tend to grow darker with age. A good quality wine generally will be intense in color. The "legs" seen running down the sides of a glass after being swirled, are an indication of flavor density. It is best to use a plain white background, and tilt the glass slightly as you observe clarity and color.
Riesling (pronounced REES-ling)
Also known as johannisberg or white riesling, this classic, cool-climate German
variety is perhaps the most underrated of the world’s white wine grapes. Although it reaches it apogee in Germany’s great
Mosel and Rhine River valleys (the northermost major growing regions in Europe), where it produces an array of wines
ranging from bone dry to decadently sweet (a result of botrytis cinerea, the “noble rot”), riesling also
makes quality wine in Alsace, Austria, California, Washington State, New Zealand and Australia.
Riesling’s great attribute is that it combines high natural acidity with tremendous fruit concentration, in both aroma and flavor. Thus, it can produce low alcohol wines of great character, at every level of residual sweetness, wines with incredible aging ability. Riesling’s other hallmark is its beautifully expressive bouquet, which suggest flowers, green apples, and honeysuckle blossoms.
The difficulty with riesling, from the consumer’s standpoint, is that it is made in a bewildering array of styles and gradations of sweetness, at least in Germany, a problem compounded by the incomprehensibility of German wine labels, which are a hash of hard-to-pronounce appellation, producer, vineyard, and style names. As a result, the appreciation and patronage of Riesling by American consumers has been limited.
However, these obstacles should not prevent true wine lovers from experiencing one of the world’s truly noble wines, which is a wondrously versatile food wine that complements everything from light seafood entrees to rich pork and sausage dishes and spicy Asian cuisines.
