Imagine that you are in a beautiful garden looking at an amazing red rose. At the beginning you admire its beauty from afar for a few moments. Then you carefully get closer to it and touch it, enjoying the silky feel of its petals in your fingers.
With veneration, you bend down towards the flower and its surrounding nature that created it in order to enjoy the highlight of its beauty, its intoxicating smell. For a little while you close your eyes and try to capture the moment, committing it to your memory. Every time that you see a rose, this harmonious show of smell and picture will come to your mind.
I am sure that anyone who can smell a rose and hold on to these pictures is able to enjoy a wine. The process of tasting a wine is made up of nothing more than coded steps. For a professional it is a tool for the evaluation of a wine whilst for a well-read consumer it is a tool for deciding which wine to drink with a meal. For all of us it is a way of judging whether we actual like a wine or not and then leads us to the enjoyment of all the delights it has to offer us.
The ideal partner for tasting a wine is simplicity. A glass without patterns or engravings allows us to enjoy the colour of a wine in all its glory. It is advisable for the glass to be separated in two parts - the “stem” and “bowl” of the glass. Hold the glass by its “stem” and bring the “bowl” to a 45° angle over a white surface to enjoy the colour of the wine.
The following step involves a movement that many of us do not normally do. Imagine looking at a rose, touching it, but not smelling it. The next time you are in a restaurant make note of the number of people around you who just drink their wine without smelling it at all. It's like watching the final of the World Cup with the sound turned off so that you can't hear the commentary. God help us!!!
The aromas of a wine are part of its identity and in many cases the most important part. In order to appreciate a wine's aromas we bring the wine to the entrance of our nostrils and take a steady breath in order to create a flow of air that will lead the wine's aromas from the glass to the heart of our smell and in this way we will recognise aromas that our memories can identify such as the rose above. On many occasions the aromas appear to be weak. In order to strengthen them we can lay our glass on a flat surface and swirl the glass in a circular movement two or three times and then repeat the first step. You will now discover that the wine's aromas are much stronger. This happens because the air circulating inside the glass helps the aromas to open up more easily.
Following this we take a sip, which should always be of the same amount, and allow the wine to spread across the entire surface of our tongue. To start with we should concentrate on the texture of the wine, whether it is silky like a rose, velvety, or rich and soft. This is the equivalent of the feeling we have in our fingers. The basic elements that can be understood are the four tastes that our taste buds can recognise: sweet tastes which is our first impression as the taste buds that recognise sweetness are at the tip of the tongue, then sour tastes as these taste buds are at the side of the tongue, followed by salty tastes whose taste buds are in between the sour ones and behind the sweet ones, and finally bitter tastes whose taste buds are at the back of the tongue.
If all of these steps result in satisfaction then the wine is sure to be to your liking. And as we Greeks are true merry-makers and love to have a good time, we raise our glasses and drink to our good health.
By Nikos Loukakis, Sommelier
Source: Santorini Guidebook 2007
