The Essential Wine Tasting Guide

Written by Ian Robertson on 25th August 2007

When you are first starting to really try and narrow down the flavours and sensations in wine that are to your personal taste, it can be a bit hit and miss. You listen to terms and phrases that others use, try and match them to your own experience, and it either gels or not. So, you tend to start using blanket statements to cover whether you like something or not. When a wine is “smooth” it becomes good. (I would love $10 for every time someone has described a wine as “smooth!”

But, what are the alternatives to help get a wine vocabulary that helps you describe and understand what you are tasting, without spending $$$ on tasting courses and expensive books?

Well, apart from this web site which is an invaluable resource (!!) might I suggest The Essential Wine Tasting Guide.

Packed into a package that is deceptively small, this simply laid out guide helps even experienced tasters through not only tasting descriptors divided into helpful categories, but also has numerous colour descriptors, an outline of the scoring process for Wine Shows, wine fault descriptions and even serving temperature suggestions. This all sounds way more than you would expect for a guide that is as long as a finger and truly fits in your pocket. (Don’t you hate that? Books described as Pocket Guides that would break your pocket if you really tried to put them in there?) Not with this – this is truly a pocket guide.

The thing that surprises with the guide is that it is not a “dumbed down” introduction for beginners – some of the descriptors are actually quite advanced and complicated…well, if you want to call anything about drinking wine complicated! Some of these terms really would need an experienced guide helping most tasters through with real world examples so that the taste can be associated with the term used – after all, it is hard to describe wine without drinking some!

The best part of this guide is the price – for a little over $10.00, you have a wealth of knowledge to explore.

The Essential Wine Tasting Guide is available from many cellar doors, but you can also find it at Squashedgrape, currently for $12.00.

It really does help.