How to Taste Wine

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Learn how to taste wine like a pro with these tips from wine expert Gary Vaynerchuk of the Wine Library.

Gary: You spit, you spit. You spit everything.

Let's talk about this, airing a wine. A wine getting oxygen breaks down the tannins, mainly for red wines but even white wines, it doesn't hurt. You want to swirl the wine as much as possible. The more oxygen getting in, the more it's gonna open up, the less of that bitterness, the tannins that so many people are scared of. I even recommend that if you're drinking wine that you pour it in your glass at nine in the morning and come back at night at like four or five and taste it. That much air is good. Anything you can give it or when you first get home, if you want to keep a one or two hour window.

Next, the sniffy sniff. Most people are not smelling their wines enough so you really wanna get in there. It's such a big miss in the whole process. People are just not patient and go right to drinking it. The more you smell, the more you're going to get the nuances, the more the flavors you can start getting into the tongue. Then you put it in your mouth and you want to it to get into as much of your mouth as possible, almost like mouthwash but not getting that crazy. Then blowing in air and you wanna practice this in a shower because there there's no problem, you get the mist and you go [sniffs]. You wanna do like almost that bird sound.

I'm trying to figure out how I spit. How I spit is I put my lips in like a shooting ... I tighten them up to the best of my ability like this and then force it, like so. By doing that, you're able to really get it focused and out and not all over yourself. That's why I have the wristband. In case I do, a little clean up action.