Introduction & Tasting / Evaluating Wine: Part one- Vision 👁

Introduction

Hello reader. As the Winemaker here at Brambly Park, I want to introduce myself to those who may not know who I am or how the wine program at Brambly Park works. My name is Ben Nicholas and I make small-batch wines from selective grapes grown around the globe in our on-site winery at Brambly Park.

Our flagship wines are sourced from other wineries in renowned growing regions. Those wineries produce the wine for us, while I oversee any cellar management, aging, and packaging.

We want to show you what’s going on behind-the-scenes in the winery, while we convey educational wine knowledge and wine features that you can find on our restaurant menu, Bari Trattoria, at Brambly Park.

We hope you’ll find these posts entertaining and informative in an attempt to connect you to Brambly Park as we try to bring you closer into our orbit.

Tasting & Evaluating wine: Part one- Vision

Putting your wine glass up to a white sheet of paper helps you see clearly.

I want to give you some tips for getting your wine experience to the next level; Knowing what you are tasting and how to describe it is the goal here.

Vision 👁

Today we are going to focus on looking at the wine and what you may see. This is the very first thing you will do when assessing a wine.

Color- Whether it’s red, rosé or white there will be a scaling of hue mainly dependant on the wine varietal used to make it combined with the age of the wine.

Pale, medium and deep create a good 3-tier color scale of a given wine. This can assist you with putting any wine on a spectrum in comparison to other wines. A Pinot Noir might be pale ruby, a Syrah could be a medium ruby, and a merlot could be a deep ruby.

Winefolly.com has great diagrams for wine education.

Clarity/Opacity- How see-through is the wine? Wines that are fined or filtered have a higher clarity than unfiltered wines usually. Red wines tend to extract more tannins and color (anthocyanins) from the skins.

Why filter a wine at all?

There are two main reasons wine gets filtered. The first one is to remove any bacteria and yeast in the wine that can cause a second fermentation to occur in your packaging. If that secondary fermentation happens in a non-pressure-rated bottle, it’s a ticking time bomb and can explode. If it goes into a vessel that won’t explode from the pressure, like a keg, then the wine will become a sparkling carbonated version of itself.

The other reason anyone would filter a wine is to polish it and clean it up so the clarity and color are more brilliant.

Why is there weird stuff at the bottom of my glass and bottle?

When you find “wine crystals” at the bottom of your glass or wine bottle, these are called tartrates. Tartrates are acids that have fallen out of the solution in the wine. This happens when a wine that has not been “cold-stabilized” is put on the market. When you buy that same wine and put it in a fridge that goes below 40 degrees F for a certain amount of time, that cold-stabilizes that wine and forces some of the wine’s acid to fall out of solution and down to the bottom of your bottle. A wine that ages will eventually have the same thing happen; tartrates and tannins will fall out of the wine, the wine will become clearer and you will have a bunch of weird stuff at the bottom. It is totally safe so don’t worry.

Viscosity- expresses how fast or slow a wine moves. What makes a wine have more viscosity than others? It comes down to sugar and alcohol content. High sugar content in wine will lead to high viscosity. If you try to swirl honey in a glass you would look dumb to your friends. Honey’s sugar content leads to its high viscosity. Dessert wines, for example, have high viscosity due to their high sugar content. Viscosity is also dependent on the wine’s alcohol content. Alcohol is more viscous than water. Wines that have a higher ABV are more viscous. The viscosity affects the “tears” or “legs” in your glass. The higher the viscosity the more leg/tears you will see due to alcohol and sugar levels.

Carbonation- Seeing fine bubbles that travel upwards in the glass is evidence that the wine is carbonated or effervescent. You can even see a “mousse” form at the top when poured. This one is obvious to most.

Age- Older wines turn brown. If you have ever bitten into an apple and let it sit for about a minute, you start to see oxidation effects right before your very eyes. It’s the same concept except it happens much slower due to the speed of the oxygen exchange with a wine. When you look at your wine in your tipped glass, you can see around the edge of the liquid that a browner shade than the central part of the liquid encircles the main body of the wine. Some wines taste better with age but others want to just be drunk young.

Winefolly.com- Showing color variation with age.

I hope this helped. I will cover more tasting and evaluating in more posts to come. Until then keep drinking wine.

Cheers.