Tasting
The tasting process is broken down into three different parts: sight, smell and taste.
Sight (AKA Visual Examination)
Hold the glass by its base with your thumb and curved forefinger to prevent the color of your hand from being reflected in the color of the wine. During the visual examination, you will want to evaluate the wines color, intensity and clarity.
Note - When visually comparing wines, it is important to have the same amount of wine (usually two ounces) in each glass.
Color
Hue is the specific color (as in the color of a crayon). To observe it, tilt the glass to a 45% angle. Pay attention to the color at the rim. Is it watery or does it continue to the very end? Young reds often have a blueish tint to their purple hue. This tends to change to a brickish orange with bottle age.
The overall color of red wines lightens with age. One exception is young Red Burgundy. The added sulphur can have a bleaching effect on the wine, which lightens its color. As the wine ages, the sulphur binds with other elements in the wine, and it can appear to have gained color. White wines tend to darken with age.
Intensity
This is judged by looking straight down the glass from above. To use the crayon analogy, this is how hard or how many times you covered an area with the crayon. The hue doesn’t change, but the darkness or intensity of the color does.
Clarity
Hold the wine up to the light source and observe how clear the wine is. Is it cloudy or brilliant? Cloudiness could be due to an unfined or filtered wine.
Other
Legs or tears in a dry wine are simply an indication of alcoholic strength. The longer they take to form after the wine is swirled and the more defined they are, the higher the alcohol content of the wine. They are often influenced by dish washing detergent residue.
Bubbles, very simply, indicate effervescence in the wine. In sparkling wines, they are quite obvious, but effervescence may also be present in otherwise still wine if a small secondary fermentation happens to occur in the bottle. Fine sparkling wines, such as Champagne, will have a tiny stream of bubbles, indicative of a long, slow secondary fermentation.