Smell is deeply connected with taste; some say that 75% or more of the taste we perceive comes from our sense of smell. Therefore, taking the time to appreciate the scent of your wine will enhance the taste, and with experience, the scents from your wine glass can reveal an extraordinary amount.

For this reason, it’s important to ensure that you’re not surrounded by extraneous strong smells; although wine and cheese are a popular combination, it’s best to keep the smellier stuff under wraps in order to appreciate the vintage in your glass.

Flawed wines will often reveal themselves quite obviously at this stage; a damp, musty, cardboard-like smell tells you that the wine is corked, if it’s oxidised it may smell baked or just generally “off”, and a rotten egg smell says it’s spoiled. These are all indications of a wine you may wish to simply walk away from.

Assuming that your wine is not flawed, there are three overall groups of scent that you should register; the fruit notes, the earthiness, and wood tones.

Whilst the fruit scents are intrinsic to the grape variety used, the earth and wood tones are more connected to the viticulture involved; earthiness is often connected with European wines, where it may give depth to a Burgundy or a chalky undertone to a Chablis, and may be completely absent in New World vintages.

Wood notes, meanwhile, are often connected to the method of ageing the wine; scents of toast and smoke may be brought into the wine while it rests in oak barrels. This is, again, something that varies with different varieties and vintages; a good Californian Chardonnay or a white Burgundy may be very woody, whilst other regions produce little in the way of wood notes.

Taste & Feel

And now, of course, the most important test of any wine – actually drinking it. This stage combines two of the senses; not only taste but also touch, as the way it feels in your mouth (often referred to as mouthfeel) is an important factor.

There should be little in the way of surprises at this stage – when you taste your wine, you are generally confirming the impressions it has already made upon your eyes and your nose. Consider the notes of fruit, earth and wood that you detected, and whether there are any new notes, or ones that are present in the nose but not on the tongue. You will also, of course, taste the sweetness or dryness of the vintage.

The mouthfeel of the wine will speak of its body, whether it’s light, medium or full bodied, and you will also detect the acidity, the tannin levels and much more.

What you are seeking in a good wine is a balance, a kind of harmony between all the different notes that brings them all together. You may also desire a complexity, a wine which develops tastes as it crosses the palate and which gathers nuances in the glass.

One last factor to pay particular attention to is the finish – how the wine tastes on your tongue after you’ve drunk it. One singular quality of a good wine is a long finish, allowing you to savour its complexity for much longer than a gulp of plonk permits.

Sound

Sound is perhaps not a factor that is often considered in studying wine – but it plays a part nonetheless. Those who love the satisfying “pop” of a cork may feel that there’s something lacking in the experience of opening a wine which is sealed with a metal screw-top; it doesn’t feel the same, and it certainly doesn’t sound the same.

Drinking in company also brings sounds; the clink of glasses raised in a toast, the satisfied exhale after taking a sip of a particularly good vintage, and the sound of convivial conversation and laughter. What more could you possibly desire?