With so many wines to choose from, determining your favorites is important (and pleasurable) work. Wine tasting does not have to be complicated – just focus on three main factors: how a wine looks, how it smells, and how it tastes.

1. Sight

Quite naturally, sight is the first sense to come into play when tasting wine. A wine’s color can provide hints as to its age, degree of sweetness, grape variety – even how it is made.

Examine a wine by holding the glass against a white background. Look for clarity; cloudiness can indicate that there is something wrong.

Evaluate the wine’s color. White wines may be a pale straw color, lemon-yellow, or even gold. Green highlights may mean that the wine is quite young. Deep yellow or golden tones indicate maturity through aging.

In red wines, purple hues are generally characteristic of younger wines, while brick, tawny or brownish colors indicate maturity. Each wine’s color is part of its distinctive character – try to use descriptive words when evaluating color.

2. Nose

The human sense of smell is actually more discerning than the sense of taste, and your nose can provide a significant amount of information about a particular wine before you taste it. The “perfume” of a wine can vary significantly depending not just on its age and the types of grape(s) from which it is made, but also on the soils and weather of the region where the grapes were grown (the “terroir”) and on the way in which it was aged (in oak barrels or stainless steel tanks).

Put your nose well into the glass and sniff. Concentrate just on the smell - is it powerful and complex, or simple and light? Does the smell linger, or does it dissipate quickly? Use your own words to describe the smells present in the aroma of a wine. Many Chinese people are unfamiliar with the scents of black currants or raspberries; it is perfectly acceptable to use other olfactory references (oleanders, for instance, or yangmei [bayberries]) if they are more familiar, or more accurate. There is no absolute right or wrong in describing a wine – just what is more helpful in describing it to others.

The aroma of a wine may also provide clues as to its age. White wines often become more honeyed over the years, while young whites are often described with reference to fresh flowers, fruit or newly cut grass.

3. Taste

And so finally to tasting the product of the winemaker’s art! A good wine should balance its various flavor aspects: sweetness and acidity in a white wine, for example; sweetness, acidity, and tannin in a red wine.

Sip the wine. Taste it in the front of your mouth with the tip of your tongue to detect its degree of sweetness. The bottom of the back of your tongue will tell you about the wine’s acidity. Your front gums will help you determine the character of the wine’s tannins. And finally, roll the wine around your whole mouth and swallow. First make a mental note of the “mouth feel” – is it “soft and velvety” or “thin and astringent”?

Swallow, and pay close attention to both the changes in flavor and the time it takes for the taste to disappear. This is called the “length” of a wine, and can make a very big difference in the determination of the quality of a wine. In great wines, the finish can last a minute or more, creating a moment of meditation that no other beverage can create.