Wine Smarts
How to Improve Your Wine Knowledge as a Beginner
There’s a lot of wine information out there, but not a lot of good advice on how to get started and what to learn first. Fortunately, with a little direction, you can gain lots of wine wisdom (and confidence) in a very short period of time. This guide intends to offer an outline on how to improve your wine knowledge — even if you’re starting from the very beginning.
Change the Way You Drink
The first step you must take if you want to improve your wine knowledge is to immediately change the way you drink. Keep in mind that the goal is to alter the way you buy and consume wine so that you can make better-informed choices and have a higher level of awareness. When you remember that goal, every time you taste wine suddenly becomes an opportunity to add to your wine knowledge. Changing the way you drink, means that you:
- Practice the tasting process each time you pick up a glass of wine
- Set up comparative tastings to improve your ability to taste
- Seek out new wines that will expand your tasting repertoire
This simple adjustment isn’t something that requires your full attention all the time. Just be sure to take good notes and after you’ve recorded your thoughts, you can get back to enjoying wine for its effect.
Start Your Personal Wine Challenge
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a beginner or an expert, we all have more to learn about wine. With that in mind, here is a 3-step personal wine challenge tailor-made for beginners. If you subscribe to the Wine Folly newsletter, you’ll be informed about more advanced wine challenges as they’re released.
Am I a wine beginner?
If you don’t know how to describe tannin and acidity in wine, and you’re mostly unaware of the range of wine varieties and styles available at your local wine shop, then chances are you are a beginner. So, congratulations for challenging yourself to learn more!
Step 1: Learn The Basic Wine Traits
Your first order of business is to learn how to taste the 4 traits in wine.
First things first, what is wine? In Wine Folly, The Essential Guide to Wine, wine is described as an alcoholic beverage made with fermented grapes. Technically, wine can be made with any fruit, but most wines are made with a species of grape called Vitis vinifera. These grapes are made of several different compounds (including water, sugar, acids, and polyphenols), which go through many different changes during fermentation and produce 4 basic tasting traits that are present in every glass of wine.
Step 2: Taste the 9 Styles of Wine
Go out and taste 9 wines (not all at once!)
What kinds of wine are out there in the world today? Well, there are literally hundreds of thousands of wines released every year and each has a slightly different taste. Despite this exceptional variety, there are essentially 9 overarching styles that define the scope of wine. Your next task will be tasting a wine from each of these 9 styles so that you can get a sense of this range. It may take a while to try each of them, but you’ll come out on the other side with a completely different sense of taste.
Step 3: Master The Essential Wine Etiquette
Pinkies up!
The only wine etiquette that truly matters are the steps and standards that involve preserving and tasting wine so as to ensure it tastes the way the winemaker intended it to taste. Everything else isn’t that important. The only reason wine etiquette is peculiar and somewhat specific is because wine is an extremely fragile product. Here’s where to start:
7 Basics to Serving Wine and Choosing Glassware
Last Word: Start Tonight
There is never a better time to start learning about wine than right now. And, if you have any questions along the way, you can always connect with me on Instagram or leave a comment below. Salut!
Love Wine? Join me (Madeline Puckette) and subscribe to the free Wine Folly newsletter. The complete article was originally featured on the Wine Folly Blog on October 19, 2016:
