Up-ing your wine game, Part 2. Use your words.

So you have finally started to regularly come out to the wine tastings but you haven’t gotten much past the wine description of “Oh I like this one.” One of the most common statements I get from fellow tasters is; “I just don’t have the vocabulary to describe what I’m tasting.”Anyone who has watched any of the “Somm” docu-movies on Netflix has heard the very precise-to-outlandish words used to describe both the taste and aroma of wine. Yet “garden hose” and “fresh can of tennis balls” should never come out of someone’s mouth when talking wine! Therefore, especially after hearing stuff like that, you are often left with the notion that describing wine is a task best suited for the fanciful snob.Fight against that! The practical use of descriptive vocabulary can be extremely helpful in Up-ing your wine game. The first step is to actual pay attention to what you are tasting, smelling, and feeling. The taste of wine has both a flavor component and feel component. Even if your first descriptive wine words are super basic, like “dry,” or “tart,” you have taken the first big leap in your wine journey, away from just “I liked (or didn’t like) that wine.”Here are two examples of the words I used at V.Paul’s this week to describe a white and a red wine during the tasting: “A little bit of green apple with a tart finish, too acidic; “Lots of fruit-plum, blue berry, light tannins, medium acid.” Simple, efficient, effective, nothing outlandish.So, use your words! I didn’t have all of those “wine words” when I started. Part of the fun and allure of wine is broadening your taste horizon. As you go to more wine tastings and begin to pay better attention to the wine in your mouth, your vocabulary will improve. That’s step one in Up-ing your wine game. In part two we will discuss a few very effective “wine words” to use.