How to Taste Wine at Home

Draymond Green to toast Steph Curry with $5K bottle of wine – on Warriors owner's tab. —headline on USA Today, October 26, 2021

The National Basketball Association (NBA) runs professional basketball in the United States. This week they announced the 75 greatest players of all time and one of the Golden State Warriors (San Francisco) players, Steph Curry, made the list.

His teammate Draymond Green felt the need for celebration and so, he took Steph out to dinner and charged a $5,000 bottle of DRC (Domaine de la Romanee Conti) to their boss, Joe Lacob, who owns the team.

I’m thinking you might have trouble doing the same thing with your boss but then, maybe it’s worth a try. It’s DRC after all.

Of course, Joe Lacob and the Warriors got a lot more than $5,000 worth of publicity. Most really, really expensive bottles of wine are bought with an eye on the PR it will generate. It can be the best marketing dollars a company (or wealthy individual), can spend.

But, what caught my interest was the way the sports announcers on radio, TV and social media reacted. When they stopped laughing, they started asking a string of questions that normal people ask about such things.

I was fascinated because I hardly ever hear normal people talk about wine—I usually hear people in the business, often discussing subtleties that lie largely in the realm of hallucination.

The $5,000 wine — photo from Christies below, www.christies.com

Can any wine be worth $5000?

As official normal people, the sports announcers began with asking “Can a bottle of wine really be worth $5,000?”—something no self respecting wine person would ever let cross their mind.

The answer is: not only can it be worth $5000, it is worth $5000, because that’s what Lacob paid for it. I’ve already told you why it was a good business investment, so in this case, it was financially worth it as well.

But, of course what they were really asking was “Does this bottle really taste that different from say $1,000 bottle of wine, or a $100 bottle, or even a $10 bottle?”

The example they posited is, “If you took bottles that cost $30, and $50 and $100 and so on up to $5000 and lined them up side by side, could you really taste the difference?”

Well now, that depends on who “you” is.

If you’ve got $5000 to spend on a wine for ritual celebration purposes, in this case the best wine for the best player, then you don’t care—taste is not the point. If it had gone bad you might not even notice or care either one.

But, what if taste is the point?

Then, it becomes a question about your ability to notice difference.

Despite popular imagination just drinking a lot doesn’t make you able to tell the difference in anything. You have to taste with the intention of expanding your awareness of the qualities of wine—-color, aroma, texture and so on.

“It smells like a morning in May” won’t work. A winemaker can’t blend a morning in May. But they can blend for raspberry aromas.

So, how do you do develop that skill?

Descriptor Tasting

Today, you can buy kits with vials (see photos below), or machines that spray out the smells, but in the days gone by, I had to do it by hand.

For many years I traveled the country, as well as selected highlights of the world, teaching people how to tell the differences in wine using an abbreviated form of the training a wine maker gets, minus the chemistry. It was called a descriptor tasting.

Descriptors are all those words people use to talk about wine. Generally they are grouped in obvious categories corresponding to nature, i.e. “fruit” smells are fruit. “Strawberry” is a particular kind of fruit. “Strawberries grown on a south facing slope in the Monterrey Peninsula” is probably an English wine critic.

Nobody actually talks like that.

The whole training is too much for this small space, but I can give you a rough idea of how it goes. Fortunately, it’s easy to set up at home so you can practice if you are so moved. Little clear plastic cups are helpful.

Doing the tasting at home

I would fly into someplace exotic, let’s say Detroit in mid-winter, and immediately go to an outlet grocery store near the training site. There, I would proceed to purchase Lychee, canned pineapples, lemons, and such along with various spices: liquid smoke, paprika, allspice, pepper— I was choosing them to match the qualities of the wine I was selling.

Depending on what I was selling, I might grab a handful of grass or leaves or dirt if it was distinctive. And, not buried in snow.

Then, I’d go to the training room and lay out 15-20 plastic cups that I had purchased on sale in the grocery store and start cutting stuff up. Bananas and strawberries are obvious—so is grass—so are Lychee nuts for that matter. I poured a neutral wine in all the cups so if it was allSpice, or pepper or liquid smoke I could just add it to the wine as a base for the smell.

I would tell people that their brain was able to recognize 20,000 smells (it turns out now that there are actually over a trillion) but even with the most familiar smells—say lemon—your brain will recognize it, but usually have a hard time naming it.

For that reason, I put cards in front of the cups with names like “lemon,” “pepper,” “bell pepper,” “oak,” etc.

You smell the lemon in the cup, look at the card, then say something clever like “lemon” in your mind a couple of times. After you’re comfortable that your brain can name lemon, then you go back and smell a wine that presumably has a lemon aroma and see if you recognize and name the smell.

You can graduate to trying (smelling) three wines only one of which may or may not have lemon aromas and see if you can tell which one is lemon, or decide that none of them are.

Things like oak, cherry, raspberry are good to learn. Cigar and cigar box if you’re tasting red Bordeaux. Try acetic acid (vinegar) for Italian reds—Chianti, Barolo, Valpolicella.

Traditionally, Italian winemakers didn’t top up the barrels so as wine evaporated an air space formed at the top. Oxygen got to the wine while it was still in the barrel and began the process of turning it to vinegar. Over the decades, generations of Italians growing up with that smell decided that’s the way they wanted their wine to taste.

If you smell that in anybody else’s wine, that’s a mistake.

You can learn to recognize winemaking faults too—ethyl acetate (nail polish remover) or brettanomyces (sweat) which are especially important not to have if you’re going to lay the wine down for a while.

Regardless of the specific smell, it’s associating the name with the aroma that is the trick.

It’s something you can learn but you have to practice and you have to keep it up. Just like shooting a basketball in a hoop, you might get great at it now, but two years later, the rust will show.

Still later, you can move on to recognizing characteristics of particular countries or regions or vineyards. And, sometimes vintages.

After a few years you will get to be an expert. At least, on the things you train with. If you don’t practice “blueberries and crushed rocks,” then you won’t recognize it.

Then when you taste wine, you have a baseline of qualities to refer to when you are met with a wine you don’t know.

Keeping up with the times

So, what do you think? If you lined up all those bottles at different prices that the sportscasters were talking about, could you tell the differences?

You could if you are trained and you keep your training up to date. For a while in Napa, winemakers were talking about the difference in a Diet Cherry Coke smell and a Diet Cherry Dr. Pepper smell in cabernets.

Prunes.

Prunes are the answer. Diet Coke has no prune aromas.

See what you learn here?

So, let’s get going. Don’t just stand there, go get some fruit and start chopping!