Tasting Wine Like a Pro (even if you aren’t one)

Gildas Royer believes that to understand a wine, one must first understand the place in which it is grown. So, when you walk into his wine store and tasting room, In Vino Gildas, be prepared to meet his wall of terroir: five shelves holding jarred samples of soil from 42 different wine regions from around the world. It is a decorative teaching tool that he employs when hosting public and private tastings in his classroom-like store.

From the vineyard to the barrel to the bottle, Gildas also knows that a good wine takes time and expertise to cultivate, and there are several factors that influence the final outcome. “I try to have a kind of exclusivity with the producer, a good relationship, to know him and spend time in the vineyard and in the cellar,” he explains.

Not everyone can have the kind of personal relationship that Gildas has with the producers whose wine he sells in his store, but everyone can have a better appreciation of wine that extends beyond taste alone. To better appreciate the predominantly white wines of Luxembourg, Gildas recommends four things to pay attention to when the first glass is poured:

Color

Before tasting a wine, first observe its color by holding it at a slight angle in front of a white piece of paper. “There will be one color in the center and another at the border,” Gildas informs.

The lightness or darkness of the color will depend largely on the wine, but as a general rule of thumb, the more pale the color of a white wine, the lighter and younger the wine; the darker and deeper yellow the color, the older. “As well, when a Luxembourgish wine is aged in new barrels of oak, the color gets darker,” he says.

Legs

Tilt the glass back upright and observe the wine as it moves. Does it leave thick, streaky “legs” along the side of the glass, or are the legs more thin and less noticeable? Gildas explains: “The larger the legs, the more residual sugars there are in a wine; it is more sweet. And if a wine is too heavy, too sweet, a person will not finish it. And then they will not be happy!”

Nose

Lift the glass to your nose and take a careful smell of the wine inside. “What aromas are there? What is the main nose character?” asks Gildas, adding, “A wine must have a nice color, nice aromas and a nice taste, but if it smells good, it doesn’t mean that it has a good taste! You could have a bitter taste, for example, that cannot be found by the nose.”

Swirl the wine in your glass and then smell it again: does the wine smell the same, or better? This will provide a hint at how the wine will react as it opens up with more exposure to air.

Mouth

Finally, you can taste the wine. Take a sip of wine and, along with it, suck in some air. This will aerate the wine and bring out certain flavors that you might not have noticed had you not taken your time to truly taste the wine.

“In the mouth there are four principal flavors: acidity, sweetness, bitterness, and salty,” Gildas explains. A good wine will be balanced between all four.

After swallowing, how many seconds does the taste of the wine linger in your mouth? This is called the caudalie, explains Gildas; the longer the flavor of the wine remains in your mouth, the higher its caudalie. “To me, the caudalie gives information about the concentration of the harvest,” he says, adding that the length of a caudalie does not necessarily indicate the quality of the wine.

Practice Makes Perfect

In the end, enjoying the taste of a wine is very much an individual preference; but enjoying the other qualities that wine offers the senses is something that can be done by anyone. Even a beginner.

But the real secret to looking like a professional when tasting the wines of Luxembourg? Practice, of course.