Part III · Tasting · 4 min
Describing what you taste
Sort before you name, and use the handful of words that actually mean something.
Beginners try to name the fruit immediately, get it wrong, and conclude they have a bad nose. The nose is fine. The problem is that recognising a smell and naming it are different skills: you’ll know a smell the moment somebody tells you what it is, and still not be able to produce the word on your own.
The fix is to narrow by category first. Six families, chosen because they’re broad enough to be reliably distinguishable.
Fruity
The grape and the climate. Red fruit points to a cooler site, black fruit to a warmer one, and tropical fruit to warmer still.
What each family tells you
| Family | Usually indicates |
|---|---|
| Fruity | The grape and the climate. Red fruit means cooler, black fruit means warmer, tropical means warmer still. |
| Vegetal / herbal | Cooler climate or earlier picking. Capsicum in Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc is methoxypyrazines. |
| Woody | Oak. Vanilla, coconut, clove, toast, smoke - winemaking, not the vineyard. |
| Mineral | A real sensation of wet stone, flint or salt, with no agreed explanation for where it comes from. |
| Smoky | Oak toast, or a volcanic site. If it smells of a struck match it is reduction instead, which is a fault - see chapter 8. |
| Balsamic | Age and warmth - resin, pine, dried herb, sometimes eucalyptus. |
Primary, secondary, tertiary
A second sorting axis, and the one that tells you a wine’s age.
- Primary - from the grape. Fruit, flowers, herbs, pepper. Dominates young wine.
- Secondary - from fermentation and its handling. Yeasty and bready from lees, buttery from malolactic conversion, vanilla and toast from oak.
- Tertiary - from ageing. Leather, mushroom, forest floor, dried fig, tobacco, petrol in Riesling.
A wine dominated by primary aromas is young. A wine where tertiary character has taken over is mature. A wine holding all three at once is usually a very good wine at its peak, and is where the word bouquet properly belongs.
The vocabulary
Wine vocabulary has a bad reputation and most of it is deserved. But some of the terms are precise and can’t be swapped for ordinary words, because the sensations they describe have no everyday name.
The full glossary is searchable elsewhere on this site. What follows is which terms describe what, and which ones actually earn their place.
The four that carry the most weight
- Balance - whether any single component stands out ahead of the others. The most useful judgement available, and the hardest to fake.
- Length - how long the flavour lasts after you swallow, counted in seconds. It tracks quality more reliably than anything else you can measure.
- Tannin - the drying grip, from skins, pips, stems or oak. A texture, not a taste.
- Acidity - the freshness that makes your mouth water. Predicts both food friendliness and ageing potential.
You can produce a genuinely informative note using only those four. Everything else is refinement.
The structural adjectives
| Term | What it describes | Grip |
|---|---|---|
| Astringent | Drying and rough, the inside of your mouth puckering. Often a wine opened too young. | Most |
| Structured | Powerful, and holding a shape you can feel rather than sitting in a heap. | High |
| Rounded | Supple and balanced, filling the mouth smoothly with no edges left sticking out. | Low |
| Silky | Smooth, balanced, and with relatively little tannin. | Least |
Those four sit on a single spectrum, from most grip to least: astringent → structured → rounded → silky. Placing a red wine on that line is a complete and useful description of its tannin, and I found it easier to learn as a set than as four unrelated words.
The ones that are mostly decorative
Some terms survive because they sound good rather than because they discriminate. Two are worth knowing about, for opposite reasons.
Œil de perdrix - literally "partridge’s eye" - has been used since the Middle Ages for the colour of certain rosés and of the very light reds people drank then. It survives mostly because it sounds good in French. It isn’t purely ornamental, though: in Neuchâtel it is a protected term for Pinot Noir rosé, so there it means something exact.
Minerality is in the same category and far more widely used. There’s no accepted mechanism by which rock in the soil ends up in your glass, and blind trials have repeatedly failed to show that tasters agree on what the word means. It names a real sensation without explaining it.