How to Taste Wine Without Becoming Insufferable

There is a moment, roughly forty seconds into any wine tasting, when a person decides who they are going to be. You can watch it happen. The glass goes down on the table, the first pour lands, and something crosses their face — a small, private negotiation — and then they either relax into their chair or they sit up very straight and begin to talk about minerality.

I have poured for a great many people at the long table on Via Gibilmanna, and I want to say clearly, at the top, that the ones who sit up straight are not bad people. They are nervous. Wine has spent about two hundred years being marketed as a test, and they have arrived believing they might fail it. So they reach for the vocabulary they have heard on television, and the vocabulary reaches back, and by the third glass they are describing a perfectly nice Grillo as having “a certain tension.”

Last spring a man came in wearing a linen blazer the colour of a communion wafer. He swirled his glass so vigorously that a small amount of Etna Rosso left the building. Then he held it up to the window, squinted, and announced to his wife, to me, and to two Danish women who had not asked, that the wine had excellent legs.

The legs — those slow streaks that run down the inside of the glass — tell you approximately one thing, which is that the wine contains alcohol. That is it. That is the whole message. It is the wine equivalent of holding up a book and observing that it has pages.

I did not say this. What I said was: “Try it with your eyes shut.”

He looked at me the way you look at a waiter who has suggested you eat with your hands. But he did it. He shut his eyes, and he took a mouthful, and he sat there for a good five seconds with the wine in his mouth and his eyebrows doing something complicated. And when he opened his eyes he said, in an entirely different voice, “It's like the smell of a garden after rain. When you were a kid. That specific smell.”

And that is a tasting note. That is worth a hundred pages of tension and minerality, because it is true, and because it is his.

The only four things you actually have to do

Everything else is decoration. If you do these four, in this order, you are tasting wine properly, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

1. Look, but briefly

Tilt the glass over something pale — a napkin, the table, your own forearm. You are checking two things and neither takes long. Is it clear or cloudy? (Cloudy is not automatically a fault; a lot of the natural wines we pour are hazy on purpose.) And what is happening at the rim? A red that has gone brick-orange at the edge has some age on it. A red that is purple to the very rim is young and probably still arguing with itself.

Five seconds. Then move on. Nobody has ever tasted a wine with their eyes.

2. Smell it twice

This is the part people skip, and it is the part that matters most — something like eighty per cent of what you experience as flavour arrives through your nose.

Smell it once before you swirl. The wine is still, and the most delicate aromatics are sitting right on the surface. Then swirl — gently, on the table, no theatre required — and smell it again. Swirling drags air through the wine and throws off a completely different set of aromas.

Do not try to name things yet. Just notice whether the second smell is bigger, or different, or better. Wine that changes in the glass is wine that has something to say.

3. Take a proper mouthful

A sip is not enough. A sip coats the front of your tongue and tells you about sweetness, and nothing else. Take enough to move around — a small mouthful — and let it get to the back and the sides, where you register acidity and bitterness and the drying grip of tannin.

You may aerate it, drawing a little air through the wine, if you can do so without choking. It genuinely helps. It also sounds appalling. In a room full of strangers I would say the social cost outweighs the aromatic gain, but at home, alone, in your kitchen, gargle away.

4. Wait

Here is the one that separates people who like wine from people who are learning it. After you swallow, do nothing for ten seconds. Do not reach for the bread. Do not say anything. Just sit there.

What you are waiting for is the finish — what the wine leaves behind. A cheap wine vanishes almost immediately, like a guest who did not want to come. A good wine keeps talking after it has gone. And the finish is where you find out whether you actually like something, because the finish is the part you will be living with.

What Sicilian wine, in particular, asks of you

Sicily is not one wine region. It is an island with a volcano in the middle of it, and the distance between a vineyard on the eastern slopes of Etna and a vineyard on the baked southern plains is not measured in kilometres so much as in centuries. If you taste Sicilian bottles expecting one thing, the island will make a fool of you. Cheerfully.

A few of the grapes we pour most often, and what to actually look for:

• Nerello Mascalese — the great red of Etna, grown on black volcanic soil at altitudes that would be considered unwise anywhere else. Pale in the glass. People expect something huge and dark and get something that looks almost like a Burgundy, which is why it upsets tourists. Look for the way it feels sharp and dusty at the same time, like the air off a stone wall in September.
• Nero d'Avola — Sicily's most planted red, and the one that has been most consistently ruined by people making too much of it. Done well, it is dense, warm, black-fruited, with an unexpected sourness underneath that keeps it from being jammy. We have written a whole piece about this grape, because it deserves one.
• Carricante — the white of Etna, and the wine we most often use to change somebody's mind. Bone dry, very high acid, with a mineral bite that genuinely does taste of wet stone. It improves for years, which almost no one expects of a Sicilian white.
• Grillo — historically the backbone of Marsala, now making dry whites that smell like the inside of a greenhouse. Herbaceous, saline, a little bitter on the end in the way good Italian whites often are.
• Frappato — light, pale, floral, wildly aromatic. It smells like a strawberry patch and drinks like something much more serious. Chill it. Everyone is scandalised, and then everyone is converted.

What links them is not a flavour. It is a shape: Sicilian wine tends to arrive warm and generous and then finish dry and slightly bitter, the way the island's food does. That bitter turn is not a flaw. It is the point. It is what makes you want the next mouthful, and the next piece of bread, and to stay for another hour.

The vocabulary problem

Nobody actually smells “forest floor.” Nobody has ever knelt down in a forest and had a good hard sniff of the floor. What they mean is damp, brown, faintly sweet, slightly decayed, and they are reaching for a shorthand that other wine people will recognise.

The shorthand is not evil, but it is a second language, and speaking it badly is worse than not speaking it at all. So here is the rule we use at the table: describe the memory, not the thing.

Wine aroma runs directly into the part of the brain that stores memory, which is why a glass can ambush you with a specific afternoon from 1994. When someone tells me a wine smells like their grandmother's linen cupboard, or a hardware store, or the inside of a new car, or the pool changing room at their school, I know exactly what they mean. Those are real. Those are useful. “Notes of red fruit” tells me nothing except that the speaker would like to be left alone.

A woman from Hamburg once told me a wine tasted “like a church, but a happy one.” I have thought about that sentence for two years. I still know which bottle she meant.

Four things that are not true

1. Expensive means better. Price tracks scarcity, oak, reputation and marketing budget. Above about twenty euro, the correlation with pleasure collapses almost entirely. Some of the most memorable bottles we open cost less than a plate of pasta on the seafront.
2. Red with meat, white with fish. A rule invented for a cuisine that is not this one. Chilled Frappato with grilled sardines will realign your understanding of the universe. What actually matters is matching weight and matching acidity — a rich dish needs a wine with enough acid to cut through it.
3. Older is better. Roughly ninety per cent of all wine produced is meant to be drunk within two or three years. Ageing a bottle that was not built for it does not make it profound; it makes it tired. See also: my grandmother, and the eleven years.
4. You need a good palate. You need attention. That is all a “good palate” is — someone who has paid attention on purpose, repeatedly, and can now remember what they noticed. It is a habit, not a gift, and you can start building it this evening with whatever is open in your kitchen.

The simplest possible practice

If you want to get better at this without doing anything that looks like homework: open two bottles at once. That is the entire method.

One glass on its own is a fact you cannot check. Two glasses side by side is a comparison, and comparison is how palates are actually built. Two whites. Two reds. Same grape, different producer; or same producer, different year. Taste one, taste the other, go back to the first. Within about ninety seconds you will find yourself saying something specific and true, such as “that one is sharper” or “this one goes on longer,” and you will have skipped four years of pretending.

It is why our tastings are built the way they are — pours in pairs, on a calendar that follows the season, rather than a lecture with a bottle at the end.

What happened to the man in the linen blazer

He came back in July. Different jacket. He sat down at the same end of the table and told me he had been doing the thing with his eyes, at home, on Sundays, and that his wife found it deeply unsettling. Then he tried a Carricante we had just taken on and shut his eyes without being asked and sat there for a long moment.

“Swimming pool,” he said. “The good part. Before you get in.”

He was right. It is a very high-acid, saline, slightly chalky white and it does smell exactly like standing on the edge of a cold pool in the morning. Every person I have poured it for since has said something about stone or salt or minerals, and every one of them has been less correct than the man in the linen blazer.

Which is the whole thing, really. Not knowing more words. Knowing which of your own words are true.

If you would like to try this at the long table rather than at your kitchen counter, we run small tastings most afternoons — book a seat here, and bring a memory to compare it against.