APPEARANCE OF WINE
Appearance can tell you a great deal about your wine before your nose ever picks up its scents and your taste buds ever feel its touch. You can learn of the wine's acidity and tannin content, residual sugar and alcohol content, as well as the age of your wine just by looking at it. You can gather information on the growing climate of the grape, the maturation stage of the grape at the time of harvest, as well as filtration, storage history and possible issues with the wine. All of this information can be gathered through a simple visual inspection of the wine. The basic things you will be inspecting in the appearance of a wine to obtain this information are its clarity, general overall colour, any secondary colours, any particles, and lastly, the legs of the wine.
CLARITY
Inspecting the clarity of the wine, if it is clear and bright, if it is dark or hazy, can tell you much about the body weight of the wine, acidity, alcohol or sugar content, filtration practices, and possible contamination. Brightness is measured by the wine's ability to reflect light and it speaks to the clarity of the wine. This is measured through the white sheet test where a connoisseur of wine will tilt the glass of wine forward against a white backdrop and observes how much the light reflects in the glass and onto the white surface below the glass.
A clearer, brighter wine eludes to a more light bodied and acidic wine, especially if bubbles are present on the bottom of the glass. A darker wine can foreshadow a fuller body with less acidity and more alcohol or sugar. Haziness within a wine can suggest an unfiltered wines. This haziness can be the result of natural sediments and particles in the unfiltered and older wine. One must be careful though. Haziness can also correspond to a wine contaminated during processing or due to incorrectly being stored over time.
Wines which have been more refined through filtration are clearer and freer of sediment and particles. Filtering makes the wine clearer and removes unwanted microbes and residue that might otherwise tamper with a bottle of wine over time. For this reason, one might prefer a more filtered wine if the intentions are to leave it corked for quite some time. For some wines, but not all, the downside of filtration is a loss in flavour. For other wines filtration reduces the chewiness of high tannins, which may or may not be good depending on personal taste and preference in regards to tannins .
Overall, brightness does not speak to quality necessarily. Red wines are almost never brilliantly bright as a white wine might be because of the dark pigment colour blocking the light reflection. On the other hand, white wines will almost always reflect more light than a red, scoring higher on any brightness scale. It is simply a way of roughly measuring the clarity to obtain the level of acidity and filtration in a wine. All of this speaks to personal taste and intentions for wine. Do you prefer a more tart acidic wine? Are your intentions to let that bottle age for the next ten years? Do you prefer the chew of tannins or is less chewiness more your cup of wine?
COLOR
Inspecting the colour of a wine would next involve looking at the overall colour, also known as the primary colour. The overall colour is mostly provided by a the skin of the grape variety. Generally, varieties used in the production of white wine are thinner and lighter skinned while those which produce red wines are thicker and darker skinned. This gives the wine its basic initial colour. The skins of grapes used in red wines also contain tannins. The more deep the purple-red, the more tannins there are. Whites can contain tannins through oaking and this may be noticeable through a darker more golden colour of the wine. The darker the colour of the wine speaks to the amount of tannins in the wine and therefore the relative bitterness and astringency of the wine. While the grape variety gives a wine its initial colour and tannin content, the age of a wine can effect the colour and tannin content. Aging causes slow oxidization of the wine which changes its colour. A white wine will become darker with age, becoming more golden. A red, with age will become paler and take on a browner hue. While this occurs naturally with age, a premature darkening of a white or a premature lightening of a red can be caused by incorrect storage temperature and you should always compare the colour to the vintage of the wine to see that there are no discrepancies. Aging will also soften any tannins, reducing the puckering astringent effect over time.
Wines can sometimes contain secondary colours that give hints to its age, healthiness, acidity and residual sugar content. With a glass of white wine, using the white backdrop test that is used for clarity, we can look to the outer edges of the glass that are reflected on the white backdrop. Hints of green, silver or unpolished brass in these reflected edges are tells of a wine produced by grapes high in chlorophyll, the unripe portion of grapes. This may indicate a white wine that is young and produced from grapes grown in cooler climates. As a grape ripens, its acids are converted to sugars. Grapes grown in a cool climate don't always fully ripen, and therefore have more acidity and less residual sugar. This lack of residual sugar may also mean a lower alcohol content since it is the sugars that are converted to alcohol. It may also mean a moderate amount of alcohol but a dry wine with no sweetness. There is also a secondary colour characteristic called rim variation. Rim variation takes place in an older red wine of ten years or more, or an exceptionally old white wine. It is a gradation of colour in the glass. This is where the wine at the center of the glass is of a deeper colour than that at the rim with any number of varying gradations of colour between the center and rim. The general rule is that the older the wine is, the more variation in colour.
SEDIMENT
After the clarity and color has been inspected, viewing the wine for sediment can take place. Sediment is not uncommon in a red or white wine. Some white wines will display small, opaque white crystals known as tartaric acid, or tartrates. These are completely harmless and tasteless and are naturally present in all white wine and become visible when introduced to very cold temperatures such as colder refrigeration or freezing. Excess Tartrates are usually removed before bottling by the winery but some wineries choose not to remove the tartrates and so they will inevitably form in the bottle when put in the fridge or an ice bucket. The simple solution is to let the wine warm up a bit allowing the crystals to dissolve back into the wine. Tartrates are also found in minimally processed reds in the form of deeply colored crystals on the bottom of the cork or in the neck of the bottle. These can be wiped away with a clean cloth. With older red wines, or some young unrefined red wines, sediment can form from tannins which have precipitated out as the wine ages. This sediment can be fine or chunky and careful decanting can remove it. The sediment formation means the wine will be less tannic when drunk.
LEGS
Lastly to be inspected through appearance are the wine's Legs or tears. The legs of the wine are the streaks of wine forming on the side of the wine glass from swirling. These legs can be inspected through swirling the glass circularly and then raising the glass to the light and observing the streaks of wine as they make their way back down the sides of the glass and into the body of liquid. You want to observe the side and width of the legs and how quickly or slowly they move down the side of the glass. The legs can tell us about the relative level of alcohol in the wine and the presence of residual sugar. Thinner, more quickly moving legs will tell of a wine possibly light-to-medium in body with relatively low alcohol or without residual sugar. Legs that are thick, tinted in colour and slow to move, can possibly indicate a full-bodied red wine with considerable concentration, that is possibly relatively high in alcohol content and/or considerable residual sugar.
CLARITY
Inspecting the clarity of the wine, if it is clear and bright, if it is dark or hazy, can tell you much about the body weight of the wine, acidity, alcohol or sugar content, filtration practices, and possible contamination. Brightness is measured by the wine's ability to reflect light and it speaks to the clarity of the wine. This is measured through the white sheet test where a connoisseur of wine will tilt the glass of wine forward against a white backdrop and observes how much the light reflects in the glass and onto the white surface below the glass.
A clearer, brighter wine eludes to a more light bodied and acidic wine, especially if bubbles are present on the bottom of the glass. A darker wine can foreshadow a fuller body with less acidity and more alcohol or sugar. Haziness within a wine can suggest an unfiltered wines. This haziness can be the result of natural sediments and particles in the unfiltered and older wine. One must be careful though. Haziness can also correspond to a wine contaminated during processing or due to incorrectly being stored over time.
Wines which have been more refined through filtration are clearer and freer of sediment and particles. Filtering makes the wine clearer and removes unwanted microbes and residue that might otherwise tamper with a bottle of wine over time. For this reason, one might prefer a more filtered wine if the intentions are to leave it corked for quite some time. For some wines, but not all, the downside of filtration is a loss in flavour. For other wines filtration reduces the chewiness of high tannins, which may or may not be good depending on personal taste and preference in regards to tannins .
Overall, brightness does not speak to quality necessarily. Red wines are almost never brilliantly bright as a white wine might be because of the dark pigment colour blocking the light reflection. On the other hand, white wines will almost always reflect more light than a red, scoring higher on any brightness scale. It is simply a way of roughly measuring the clarity to obtain the level of acidity and filtration in a wine. All of this speaks to personal taste and intentions for wine. Do you prefer a more tart acidic wine? Are your intentions to let that bottle age for the next ten years? Do you prefer the chew of tannins or is less chewiness more your cup of wine?
COLOR
Inspecting the colour of a wine would next involve looking at the overall colour, also known as the primary colour. The overall colour is mostly provided by a the skin of the grape variety. Generally, varieties used in the production of white wine are thinner and lighter skinned while those which produce red wines are thicker and darker skinned. This gives the wine its basic initial colour. The skins of grapes used in red wines also contain tannins. The more deep the purple-red, the more tannins there are. Whites can contain tannins through oaking and this may be noticeable through a darker more golden colour of the wine. The darker the colour of the wine speaks to the amount of tannins in the wine and therefore the relative bitterness and astringency of the wine. While the grape variety gives a wine its initial colour and tannin content, the age of a wine can effect the colour and tannin content. Aging causes slow oxidization of the wine which changes its colour. A white wine will become darker with age, becoming more golden. A red, with age will become paler and take on a browner hue. While this occurs naturally with age, a premature darkening of a white or a premature lightening of a red can be caused by incorrect storage temperature and you should always compare the colour to the vintage of the wine to see that there are no discrepancies. Aging will also soften any tannins, reducing the puckering astringent effect over time.
Wines can sometimes contain secondary colours that give hints to its age, healthiness, acidity and residual sugar content. With a glass of white wine, using the white backdrop test that is used for clarity, we can look to the outer edges of the glass that are reflected on the white backdrop. Hints of green, silver or unpolished brass in these reflected edges are tells of a wine produced by grapes high in chlorophyll, the unripe portion of grapes. This may indicate a white wine that is young and produced from grapes grown in cooler climates. As a grape ripens, its acids are converted to sugars. Grapes grown in a cool climate don't always fully ripen, and therefore have more acidity and less residual sugar. This lack of residual sugar may also mean a lower alcohol content since it is the sugars that are converted to alcohol. It may also mean a moderate amount of alcohol but a dry wine with no sweetness. There is also a secondary colour characteristic called rim variation. Rim variation takes place in an older red wine of ten years or more, or an exceptionally old white wine. It is a gradation of colour in the glass. This is where the wine at the center of the glass is of a deeper colour than that at the rim with any number of varying gradations of colour between the center and rim. The general rule is that the older the wine is, the more variation in colour.
SEDIMENT
After the clarity and color has been inspected, viewing the wine for sediment can take place. Sediment is not uncommon in a red or white wine. Some white wines will display small, opaque white crystals known as tartaric acid, or tartrates. These are completely harmless and tasteless and are naturally present in all white wine and become visible when introduced to very cold temperatures such as colder refrigeration or freezing. Excess Tartrates are usually removed before bottling by the winery but some wineries choose not to remove the tartrates and so they will inevitably form in the bottle when put in the fridge or an ice bucket. The simple solution is to let the wine warm up a bit allowing the crystals to dissolve back into the wine. Tartrates are also found in minimally processed reds in the form of deeply colored crystals on the bottom of the cork or in the neck of the bottle. These can be wiped away with a clean cloth. With older red wines, or some young unrefined red wines, sediment can form from tannins which have precipitated out as the wine ages. This sediment can be fine or chunky and careful decanting can remove it. The sediment formation means the wine will be less tannic when drunk.
LEGS
Lastly to be inspected through appearance are the wine's Legs or tears. The legs of the wine are the streaks of wine forming on the side of the wine glass from swirling. These legs can be inspected through swirling the glass circularly and then raising the glass to the light and observing the streaks of wine as they make their way back down the sides of the glass and into the body of liquid. You want to observe the side and width of the legs and how quickly or slowly they move down the side of the glass. The legs can tell us about the relative level of alcohol in the wine and the presence of residual sugar. Thinner, more quickly moving legs will tell of a wine possibly light-to-medium in body with relatively low alcohol or without residual sugar. Legs that are thick, tinted in colour and slow to move, can possibly indicate a full-bodied red wine with considerable concentration, that is possibly relatively high in alcohol content and/or considerable residual sugar.
Reference:
Sommelier Scribbler - sommelierscribbler.com
Tim Gaiser @timgaiser.com
Rick Bakas @ rickbakas.com