Collegiate Times

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"You're taking something," he said, "that is a complex chemical symphony, and that's what wine is. It's composed of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of chemical components, and you are sort of dissecting those into certain groups."

There are four categories to consider when evaluating a glass of wine:

1. Sight - Most people will examine their glass of wine's clarity and look for any haze in the wine. Normally, haze can be the result of things like dead yeast that has not been fully filtered out.

"In our society," Zoecklein said, "which is not the same as everybody around the world, our society, where you and I have been brought up drinking processed, sometimes over processed, sparkling clear beverages, physical haze precipitant and whatnot, is frequently considered a detriment or considered a quandary by many who are not that educated in wine and are afraid that a cloud or a haze could represent a public health issue."

2. Color - Evaluating the color of a wine is more based on precedent and expectations than anything else.

"If you pour a glass of white wine," Zoecklein said, "you expect it to be light, straw colored not deeply gold and brown. If it is, then depending upon the wine, that might be a signal that something's happened there."

3. Olfactory response - There are two properties to consider when evaluating your olfactory response. The first is called aroma.

"We used the term a little bit differently in wine than we would in the common vernacular. Aroma means the smell of the grape. There's two distinctive types of smells that you get in wine. One would be aroma, which is from the grape. The other would be bouquet which is a smell derived from processing," he said.

Bouquet comes from the various conditions that influence the wine as it is being created. Factors such as wood and yeast add complexity to the odor.

Incidentally, what stemware a wine taster uses affects the aroma and bouquet of the wine.

"The surface area, the depth of the glass, whether the glass funnels, in other words, cones up to channel orders to your nose, all impact the volatility of components that contribute to your sense of aroma and bouquet," Zoecklein said.

There is also the mystery behind swirling a glass of wine, which has its own proper form.

"What you should do," he said, "is bring the glass up to your nose, take a sniff, make a note mental or written of your first impression and then swirl it and then do the same. The swirling, of course, is to increase the level of volatility."

(Note: Another factor which affects the volatility of the wine is the temperature at which the wine is served, the general rule is that the lower the temperature, the less volatility.)

4. Palate - Like olfactory response, evaluating the palate is a more complex task. The first thing to consider is called the "mouth feel" of the wine. Zoecklein breaks down the mouth feel into the "mouth feel balance equation". The equation is composed of sweetness derived from the grape balanced with the acidity of the grape plus the astringency (dry mouth sensation) and bitterness which comes from the grapes and barrels.

"When we're tasting a wine (we look for)," Zoecklein said, "... good mouth feel. ... That this relationship is in harmony, that you don't get an overall propensity of sweetness, you don't get an overall propensity of acidity, nor do you get an overall propensity of astringency and or bitterness."

The other half of the palate category is flavor.

"Flavors," Zoecklein said, "(are essentially) odors because the only thing that we can taste are five components. We say we can taste wine, but frequently when you use that expression it's not in the context of sensory since it's in the context of sort of common vernacular.

We taste five components."

The five components that people can taste are sweetness, sugar, acid, bitterness and umami (savory character).

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