Now that you have a little vocabulary lesson, you're ready to taste some wines! FInally, you're thinking. I thought this guy would never shut up and let me drink something! I have a few recommended wines for this lesson, that will give you a good sense of what fruit tastes like in a white wine:

Cape Mentelle Sauvignon Blanc/Semillon (any vintage will do):

Casamaro Verdejo from Rueda (in Spain):

Both of these wines display a great deal of fruit quality. I should note that these wines also have other flavors besides fruit, but it's really pretty difficult to find a wine that only tastes like fruit, and it's probably not a wine you'd be that interested in. The fruit qualities in both of these wines should be pretty obvious.

Again, if you'd like to order these wines so you can do this tasting at home, please email me at nick@homewineschool.com. Very soon you will be able to order them online through Frankly Wines, but for now we'll just work out the order over email.

When we talk about fruitiness in white wines, it's usually divided into a few subcategories of fruit. These categories include citrus, stone, and tropical. Wine geeks and sommeliers love to talk about specifically which of these fruits they taste in wines, and they can really get specific. They might say a wine tastes like an overly ripe horned melon:

Or they might say it tasted of underipe peaches. It's great fun to list out all these fruits, but to be honest there's never really one correct answer with these things. Taste to a degree is very subjective. You should, however, if you concentrate, be able to say whether something tastes tropical, or whether it is more citrus-like. Citrus fruits include lemon, and lime; Tropical could be pineapple or bananas; and stone fruits are things like peaches and pears.

In the Cape Mentelle Sauvignon/Semillon blend, you have a prime example of a wine that has lots of citrus flavors, which is typical of Australian Sauvignon blancs. Big grapefruit is here particularly in droves. You may also detect elements of tropical fruits. As far as the other aspects besides fruit, it should be noted that this wine has a fair amount of what we call herbaceousness, or aromas and flavors of fresh cut grass. This is a signature of the Sauvignon Blanc grape, and it's very sought after. I'll leave it to you to decide if you like it or not.

The Casamaro Rueda, which is made of the grape Verdejo, by contrast, is much more about stone fruits, peach especially. It also has a fair amount of earthiness (or minerality, as it is usually referred to in white wines), but the fruit qualities still reign supreme here.

So what makes a wine fruity? The short answer to that question is the climate of the area the grapes are grown in. The warmer it is, the more fruit flavors tend to develop. To reduce the fruit flavors in wine, winemakers will often take steps to reduce the yield of grapes each vine produces. When vines are starved have to struggle to survive, they send their roots shooting deeper into the ground to search for nutrients, they pull more minerals out of the ground, and send those minerals into the flavors of the grapes. As a result, fruity wines tend to cost less. It's generally true that the warmer the climate and the cheaper the wine, the fruitier it will be. So if you like these fruity styles a lot, be thankful, because you're saving yourself a bunch of money!

So now that you've smelled, swirled, and tasted each of these wines, what do you think? Do you get the citrus and the peaches? Do you like these styles? If you don't, it's ok, because in the next lesson we'll get to taste some very different wines that you may like better.

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.

When you're first starting to learn wine, it can be really confusing! I've developed a system that does a really good job of clearing up the confusion. A lot of wine classes start off teaching about France, and its very confusing labeling laws. If you really want to learn everthing about wine, it's true, you need to learn all that. But if you just want to be able to order things you'll like at a restaurant, I don't think you really need to burden yourself with all that information. If people knew what they liked and knew how to describe their tastes to someone else, they should be able to enjoy what they get. Sounds simple right? The problem is that there's a lot going on inside a wine glass, and combine that with the fact that a lot of people have their vocabulary mixed up and backwards sometimes, it can be really hard to put into words what you liked about a wine so us professionals can understand you.

To help simplify this whole thing, I like to group wines into three different qualities-- fruit, earth, and spice. Every wine basically has some of each quality, and if you can start to identify these flavors in what you try, you can begin to develop a sense of which quality you like more of. Some wines will be very fruity, with just a touch of earth and hardly any spice. You might find that you love that style, and then the next time you're in a wine store or a restaurant, you can ask for something fruity, and the person you're talking to will definitely know what you're talking about.

Now of course these three categories are just a starting point and wine does get a lot more complicated than that. There are other qualities in wines that are important, like body, tannin, acidity, and sweetness/dryness. But for now let's just focus on defining these three categories. The lessons that follow will talk about each of these qualities, and I'll tell you about some wines that exhibit the qualities, so you can follow along at home with the wines if you like.

Happy tasting!