Wine Basics

This page is the written version of the beginners session I run. It assumes you know nothing, and it is meant to be read once and come back to.

Four things are covered: how to actually taste a wine, how pairing works, how to read a list, and what is really going on when a sommelier presents a bottle. By the end you should be able to work through a list, say what is in your glass, and order with more confidence, whether you are out with clients or drinking at home.

It all builds to one moment. The sommelier has shown you the bottle, poured a splash, and is now waiting. Underneath that moment, and every moment like it, sits one question: do I like this wine? The swirling and the vocabulary, all of it is just method for answering that question with confidence.

Take it with you

Three one-page cards that condense everything below. Print them, or keep them on your phone. The third is a blank note to fill in, because a palate gets built by writing things down.

1. How to taste wine

Everyone in the world can drink, so how is tasting any different? It doesn't have to be. Tasting is drinking with a method: three steps that tell you what the wine is doing, so your answer to "do I like this?" is an informed one rather than a guess. It is also how professionals judge wine, which helps when you want to back your opinion. The steps are look, smell, drink, and for good judgement, repeat.

Step 1: Look

Give the glass a good stare down. You may have seen people holding wine up to the light and wondered what that is about. Like photography, it is all about lighting: look straight down onto the glass and your own shadow obscures the colour.

The colour answers two questions: how old is this wine likely to be, and how intense?

For whites, the arc runs lemon to gold to amber. For reds, it runs purple to ruby to garnet, then tawny.

Both arcs are driven by the same thing: oxygen. As a wine ages and slowly takes on oxygen, whites darken and reds fade from purple towards brick. The further along the arc, the older the wine is likely to be, and the flavours shift with it: whites move from light and fruity towards caramel, butter and nuts; reds from bright fruit towards pepper, dried fruit and earth.

Then intensity. A pale wine generally signals a lighter style; a deep, saturated colour signals a heavier one.

One myth to retire while the glass is up: the legs running down the inside signal alcohol and sugar, not quality. Admire them if you like, but they will not tell you whether the wine is any good.

One look, and you already have a working guess at the wine's age and weight before it goes anywhere near your nose.

Step 2: Nose

Tasters call the smell of a wine its nose, and the word works as a verb too; you nose a wine. Everyone who tastes swirls the glass. The reason is oxygen again: swirling exposes more of the wine to air, which lifts the aromas out of the glass and starts opening the flavours ready for the palate. A tip if you cannot smell much: cover the glass with your hand while you swirl, then smell under your hand. The aromas are trapped and concentrated.

Two things to check on the nose.

First, intensity. Is it leaping out of the glass or barely there? Check it against what the colour suggested; the two should broadly agree. One caution: restraint is a style, not a fault, so intensity tells you what the wine is like, not how good it is.

Second, the aromas themselves, in three tiers: primary comes from the grape (fruit and floral: citrus in a Riesling), secondary from the winemaking (oak, butter, bread), tertiary from age (savoury, earthy, dried characters).

You will hear people reach for things like lemon on a frosty morning, magpies warbling somewhere behind it. Go for it if you like. Smell is deeply personal, so general categories (citrus, red fruits, floral) are always a safe call, and they leave everyone else room to find their own specifics.

Step 3: Drink it already

You may have seen tasters working wine around their mouth like mouthwash. In my opinion that is mostly for show; the wine covers your mouth on its own. One habit worth stealing, though: breathe in a little air as you sip, and out through your nose after. Like swirling, it feeds the wine oxygen and opens up more flavour. As for spitting, it exists so people tasting many wines can stay upright, or escape a wine they are not enjoying. Either way it is your call, and purely practical.

On the palate, work through the wine's structure.

Flavour intensity. Are the flavours clear and specific (strong lemon, obvious berry), and do they match what the look and the nose promised?

Acidity and sweetness. These two form the core of the wine's structure and freshness. High acidity makes the mouth tingle and water; that crispness is also one of the levers that helps a wine age. Sweetness registers first, on the front of the palate, and works to balance the acid. Away from wine for a moment: lemon juice in water is all acid, sharp and sour. Load the same glass with sugar and it turns sickly. Balance the two and you have lemonade. Wines play on exactly that balance, and it can sit right at any level of acid and sugar. Where you like it set is personal preference.

Body. How heavy does the wine sit in the mouth? Think skim milk against full cream: same category, different weight. Alcohol, sugar and concentration drive it, and light, medium or full is all the precision you need. Hold onto this one; it becomes the key term when we get to pairing.

Tannin. The component that dries your mouth, most obvious in red wine. Tannin binds to protein, which is why it cuts through fatty food and feels smoother alongside it, and together with acid it is one of the wine's natural preservatives, part of what lets good reds age long and gracefully. More on the food effect in pairing.

The finish. A quality wine lingers; you keep tasting it well after the swallow. Length is the cheapest quality test a beginner has. No vocabulary needed: just notice how long the wine stays with you.

That is the whole toolkit: intensity, acidity, sweetness, body, tannin, finish. Six words, and you can now describe what is in your glass and, more usefully, say why you like it.

2. How to pair wine

As mystical as pairing seems, it is not an art form. A handful of grounded rules covers almost every table.

Three interactions to remember:

Salt loves acid. Acidity cuts through salt and resets the palate, which is why chips and Champagne is a genuinely great pairing and not a joke.

Fat loves tannin. Tannin binds to protein and fat, cutting through the richness while the fat smooths the tannin in return. Both end up better, which is why steak and a heavy red is the most durable pairing there is.

Spice fights tannin. Tannin amplifies chilli heat. Unless you feel your curry is not hot enough, keep tannic reds away from spice. An off-dry Riesling with Thai food shows what the right call tastes like.

Two principles to apply:

Match the weight. You assessed body in the glass; now match it to the plate. Light dish, light wine; rich dish, full wine. A delicate fish drowns under a heavy red, and a light white vanishes next to a ragu.

Sweet dishes need sweeter wine. When the dish carries sweetness (a dessert, a sticky glaze), the wine must carry more, or the dish strips the wine of everything and leaves it thin and sour. With savoury food you can ignore this rule; it only comes into play when sugar is on the plate.

And the point underneath all five: pick wines you actually want to drink. The rules do not exist to impress anyone. They exist to protect a wine you like from a plate that fights it.

3. Decoding a wine list

The book arrives, separate to the menu, and it is somehow both enormous and unhelpful. Every list, though, follows the same anatomy line by line:

Year. Producer. Grape. Region. Price.

The year plugs straight into what you learned from colour: it tells you where on the age arc the wine likely sits, still bright and fruity or settling into savoury territory.

One wrinkle worth knowing: some lists, especially European-leaning ones, name places instead of grapes. A short decoder covers most of it. Chablis is Chardonnay, Sancerre is Sauvignon Blanc, Chianti is Sangiovese, Rioja is mostly Tempranillo. If a name on a list means nothing to you, it is almost certainly a place, and the sommelier will happily translate.

Then strategy, for when nothing on the list is familiar:

Skip the trophy wines. The most expensive bottles are rarely worth it unless you know exactly what you are buying and want that bottle specifically. If so, go for it. The old trick of ordering the second-cheapest bottle can be retired too; pick the wine, not the position on the list.

Skim the shape of the list. Lists run white, rosé, red. Think back to pairing: what is the table eating? Steak night, start in the reds.

Read the depth. This is the most useful signal on any list: what a venue stocks in depth is what it cares about. Twelve Shirazes and a single Pinot Noir tells you the restaurant has compared its options and committed to Shiraz. Order from the deep end of the list and you are ordering from their strength.

And when you would rather hand it over, give the sommelier a formula instead of a shrug: name a wine you have enjoyed before, by grape, region or producer; say whether you feel like something lighter or fuller; and point at a price on the list rather than saying a number out loud. Ten seconds, no vocabulary required, and the table hears none of the budget conversation.

That is the list handled: you are now working it, not pointing hopefully at the middle of it.

4. Sommelier service etiquette

Start with the misconception, because it is the one that matters: the taste pour is not to check whether you like the wine. It is to check whether the wine is faulty. The ritual dates from a time when winemaking was less scientific and faulty bottles were far more common. The theatre has survived because the check is still worth doing.

The sequence runs in six beats:

1. The bottle is shown. Verify it is what you ordered, producer and vintage. This is the venue's version of a spell check, and it is also proof the wine going into your glass comes from this exact bottle, opened in front of you.
2. The taste is poured.
3. Nose it. You are hunting one thing: damp cardboard or wet dog, the signature of cork taint, known in the trade as TCA.
4. Check the temperature. Too cold and the flavours close up; too warm and it turns soupy and jammy.
5. Glance at the colour. Browning beyond what the style suggests, in a red or a white, can signal oxidation. Gold in a white is often just age or oak; brown is the warning.
6. Sip. If the flavours seem muted, the wine likely needs to open up, which just means time and oxygen. Run through this sequence, tell the table it is worth letting the wine sit for 10 minutes, and you will look like you have done this for years.

If you find a fault, say so. The sommelier may even be excited; it does not happen often. They will taste it to confirm, and a confirmed fault means a replacement or similar bottle at no charge. If they cannot confirm it, the wine is sound and simply not to your taste, and that is the ordinary risk of ordering, nothing to be embarrassed about. The ritual protects you from faults, not from preferences.

All of that, packed into two or three minutes of table theatre. Which brings everything back to where we started.

The takeaway

Every skill on this page serves one question: do I like this wine? The looking, the swirling, the six structural words, the pairing rules, the list strategy, the ritual: all of it is method for answering that question with confidence instead of guesswork.

And one habit compounds it all: when a wine lands for you, write down the grape, the region and the producer. Three details, every time. That is how a palate gets built, not by memorising a book of names but by paying attention to what you actually enjoy. Do that for a year and the wine list stops being a test and starts being a menu.