Fundamentals of Wine Tasting - Taste Wine like a Sommelier

Tasting wine like a professional starts with the optimal setting. In this lesson we review how to properly set-up a wine tasting.

Observing a wine through sight is a critical step in wine tasting. Learning to identify depth, color, clarity and hues in a wine can help you deductively taste wine.

A key aspect of tasting wine is observation. You must be able to understand the clarity and color of wine while also distinguishing what the different hues in wine mean.

If you want to know how to identify scents in wine, this section is for you. One of the keys to wine tasting like a professional is to be able to decipher and identify key aromas and notes. Together we will uncover how to pull out various scents in wine. A great resource to have when learning to taste wines is the Wine Folly Flavors Wheel that we have a link to in our resources section.

Have you ever been served a bottle of wine that tasted funny? There is a chance that your bottle was faulted. What does it mean when your bottle of wine is corked? It means that the wine has been damaged by bacteria. In this lecture, we discuss the details on how to identify common wine faults.

If you have ever wondered how to know if a wine is faulted, this lecture should give you some helpful hints. Let’s put your understanding of wine faults to the test with this little quiz on wine faults.

In this lecture, we do a deep dive into the varying fruit notes that can be identified in wine. In this lecture you will learn how to clearly talk about various notes in a wine and you will sound like a wine professional.

You’ve heard about oak in your wine. Using oak during Vinification is a common wine-making decision. However, have you ever wondered how to know if your wine has oak? Or maybe you’re curious about how to tell the difference between French and American oak in wine. This lecture will take you through the non-fruit characteristics of wine as well discuss oak and other key aromas.

You’ve now spent more time smelling a glass of wine than you ever thought possible. However, with the majority of taste being absorbed through your olfactory sense, learning how to properly smell a wine is important.

Identifying aromas in wine may be the single most important part of wine tasting. This quiz will test your retention of some of the most important elements of wine tasting.

This lecture will help you take all of the foundations of tasting wine we have learned to this point in the course and apply them to tasting wine. Properly identifying flavors in wine is not that different than identifying the aromas.

You may ask for a full bodied wine or maybe a sweet wine. But, in so doing, where you actually asking the right question? Many individuals ask for a fruity wine when they want a sweet wine and bold wine when they want a tannic wine. This lecture will help you explore key difference in tasting the structural elements of wine.

It can be challenging to understand the structural elements in wine. When someone asks for a sweet wine, are they asking about sugar content or fruitiness? After taking the previous course you should be able to identify structural wine elements. This quiz will test your knowledge.

Thanks for taking our course on how to taste wine like a sommelier. Hopefully this course prepared you with a solid foundation for tasting wine. Be sure to check out some of our other courses to further your wine knowledge.