For no good reason, I thought I'd make a quick blog posting on the "ceremony of wine tasting."

[xiphias]

You know, that whole thing where the person smells the cork, and tastes the wine, before letting the waiter or wine steward pour?

Actually, all the things in that are for specific reasons. And they're not too difficult to understand.

Okay. So the first thing is that the server puts the cork in front of you. You can feel free to ignore it, but there are three things that you can do with it: smell it, feel it, and look at it. And they all have a purpose.

See, there are two main categories of wine: fine wine, and table wine. Table wine is stuff you just drink. You don't go through this whole ceremony -- you just pour from the jug, or the box, or the bottle, and drink the stuff. There's a lot of really good table wine out there -- I've got two boxes of Australian table wine on my counter right now -- a Shiraz and a Chardonnay, about twenty glasses of wine per box, for seventeen dollars. And it's REALLY good stuff. The difference between "fine wine" and "table wine" is that "fine wine" is for sipping and tasting, and "table wine" is for drinking.

The whole "ceremony" thing is only done for "fine wine". And the vast majority of fine wines have the name of the vineyard or manufacturer printed on the side of the cork. So that's the first thing you're looking for -- does the name on the cork match the name on the bottle?

See, it's pretty easy to soak off a wine label. So it'd be pretty trivial to take a cheap bottle of wine, soak off the label of an expensive bottle of wine, and slap that label on the cheap bottle. And then sell the expensive bottle to someone else, or just drink it yourself. And it would look exactly the same.

But it's a lot harder to replace a cork. So if the side of the cork matches the label, it's probably the right wine.

The second thing you do is feel it, roll it around in your fingers. What you're feeling for is to make sure that the cork doesn't feel all dry and crumbly. Because if the cork is dry and crumbly, then the wine has gone bad. You can pretty much tell from just that.

I think all of you know that making food using microbes has all sorts of potential to screw up. Cheese, wine, beer, cured meats, other fermented foods -- they're great when they work, but you know that there's a real chance that some microbe other than the one you were going for is gonna get in there first, and make whatever it was into something totally nasty. So you maintain the conditions under which the food matures, to make sure that only the microbes you want are doing stuff.

If the cork is dry and crumbly, then it has become permeable to other microbes. And so you know that some other microbe has gotten in there and screwed stuff up.

That's what the smelling the cork is for, too. If the cork smells like wet dog, wet basement, or swamp, you don't even go on to tasting the wine.

So, what are you doing with the cork? You're checking to see if the cork is totally gross. If it's disgusting, you don't drink the wine. Simple, hunh?

So, let's say the cork isn't totally gross. So then you get a little bit poured into your glass. So, first, you look at it. If there's little things floating in it, you don't drink it. If it's just sort of cloudy, that may well be just how they make it, and that's not a problem. But if there's stuff in it? It fails, and you don't taste it.

Then you smell it. If it smells like vinegar, wet dog, crap, or stinky feet, you don't drink it.

Finally, you taste it. Generally speaking, if there was something seriously wrong, you would have noticed by now, so. mainly, you're just confirming that the stuff is okay.

See, that's the thing about the "wine ceremony." People think that it's a way to see if the wine is good. It's not. It's just to confirm that the wine isn't undrinkably bad.

So, there you go. Now, the next time you order a bottle of wine, you can go through the ceremony with confidence, knowing that each of the steps has an actual purpose -- to keep you from putting something that smells like crappy wet dog feet in your mouth.

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Including then. There have been wine producers that have tried to fob off wine faults as wine characteristics. There have been people that have claimed that "barnyard" is not a fault, it's a characteristic.

They are wrong. If it smells like crap and tastes like crap, then it's bad wine, no matter how many people say it's supposed to taste that way. (Sadly, this is an actual argument in wine circles.)

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

So Crappy Wet Dog Feet Chianti must be a product of the Barnum label, no?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Precisely. Of which there are a truly staggering number.