Before we can get started describing Fruit, Earth, and Spice, we need to make sure that you're tasting things correctly. This is the part when you get to find out why those people keep swirling their glasses and making funny sucking noises after they drink the wine!

The first important thing when tasting wine is to get a really good smell of what's in your glass. The tongue can actually only taste 4 things- sweet, salty, bitter, and acidic. The rest of flavors that we taste all come from our nose as the aromas of the wine waft their way up our nasal canal from inside our mouth. So, don't skip smelling  the wine, it's a really important part of tasting, and it's a lot of fun too. Breathing deeply and focusing your mind on something is a form of meditation, so not only will it help you discern the wine better, it will probably help you relax too.

So, first we'll start with some swirling. This is easiest to do when the glass is on a surface. You'll want to swirl the glass in circles strong enough so the wine really gets going far up onto the sides of the glass. What you're doing here is activating the aromas of the wine by integrating air. When the wine touches the air, it releases a powerful dose of aromas, that the right kind of wine glass will funnel up to your waiting nose.

Now that you've swirled the glass, pick it up and tilt it at as far as you can without spilling the wine all over yourself. Stick your nose inside the glass as far as it'll go and point your nose so it's parallel to the wine, and take a few careful sniffs. It's better to sniff lightly, like a dog does, as you'll actually get more information that way than one big long smell. You'll also protect yourself in case there's something wrong with the wine that smells really terrible. If you want to look like you really know what you're doing, you can tilt the glass up and down and to either side, adjusting the angle of your nose compared to the wine. You may pick up more or less fruit or earth at different angles, but most importantly, your friends will be really impressed with you.

Now that you've smelled the wine, it's time to actually drink some! At this point, you probably thought that point would never come. Take a little sip into your mouth. What you want to do know is swirl the wine all over the inside of your mouth including your cheecks, gums, tongue and the back of your throat. Some people like to actually pretend they're chewing the wine, really mashing it all over their mouth. The different areas of your mouth will tell you different things about the wine, and I'll get into all those details at some point later.

You can also combine taste and smell, by breathing some air over the wine. This is tricky at first. Tilt your head back a tiny bit, open your mouth a little, and slowly breath in a little air over the wine. If you do it right, it should make a shlurping sound as the air runs through the wine. You may be initially shocked by the intensity of flavor that rockets down your mouth. When you do this, you're essentially doing the same thing you did when you swirled the glass, but now it's happening inside your mouth.

This whole process of swirling, smelling, and swishing inside your mouth serves to really slow down the whole process of tasting wine. You'll notice a lot more about the wine when you taste like this. Sometimes I find it valuable to just take a quick swig without doing any of this as a reference for what the wine tastes like normally. You might be surprised to notice the difference. But slowing it down this way will really help you later on when you try to quantify what it is you like or don't like about a wine.