How to Drink

What can be the relation between wine-testing and hearing? What help can hearing give us?

Wine-testing, its images and imagination, starts, continues and ends through the eyes. The art of drinking is also the art of seeing.

Taste is the more “real”sense; in wine-testing, it’s the mouth that touches, the tongue on which the wine leaves different sensations: smooth or wrinkled, dry or sweet, sharp or velvety, soft or hard…

Taste reveals the mouth’s secrets.To drink is to swallow a liquid and to let it go from the mouth to the stomach. In technical tastings, the tester obviously doesn’t drink because it is enough for him to have a little sip and to keep it in the mouth and move it around, for to feel it quality

The bouquet is the main characteristic of a good wine, though the less known. In fact, there can be beautiful flowers without smell, but there can’t be a good wine without bouquet.

Here in front of you there is a glass full of some colored liquid: wine. If you want to look and admire its looks, you must remember some thoughts that are not often thought of.

The tool that makes wine-testing possible is very important (in every zone is possible to find different tools): we are talking about the glass.

In our era everything is controlled by instruments and technique; therefore we have to rediscover our senses, to observe them and learn how to use them, while learning the secrets of their power

Wine-testing is an art, and like every art it requires a specific training. Just as we recognise a melody or a painting, so we must learn to recognise a wine from its color, scent, taste, always remembering that we have already felt these sensations in different situations.

A list of flavours, though dull, can help compare the sensations that wine can give, after some training.