Last week I had the joy of intro­duc­ing my nephew to the basics of wine tast­ing. He had just turned 21, and was inter­ested in learn­ing to taste wine. This inspired me to plan his birth­day gift as a mem­o­rable expe­ri­ence, one that might plant seeds for life­long learn­ing and enjoy­ment.

After get­ting his par­ents’ per­mis­sion for this gift con­cept, I set about plan­ning an evening that he’d enjoy — and learn from. I decided to cook him a “foodie-style” din­ner that would be well matched to sev­eral white wine vari­etals, and intro­duce a sys­tem for wine appre­ci­a­tion…

A Systematic Approach

Know­ing that my nephew had stud­ied bio­chem­istry in col­lege, I decided to apply a sys­tem­atic approach. My hope was to intro­duce a sys­tem that he could use over time to hone his skills at clar­i­fy­ing and describ­ing his impres­sions of each glass of wine.

To help him focus and then orga­nize his impres­sions, I intro­duced my nephew to the wine aroma wheel. This wheel was devised by oenol­ogy pro­fes­sors at UC Davis, to help peo­ple via a shared lan­guage for describ­ing aro­mas and/or taste sen­sa­tions trig­gered by a spe­cific glass of wine. (For those of you who are tech­ni­cally minded, think of this as a tax­on­omy for aroma-based wine attrib­utes.)

Because this was his intro­duc­tory les­son, I asked my nephew to focus on just the two inner cir­cles of the aroma wheel. He got quite good at describ­ing the fruity and herba­ceous qual­i­ties of the glasses he tasted. The other char­ac­ter­is­tics were largely beyond what a new­bie could detect or describe.

To help ori­ent him to some of the fruity qual­i­ties he might observe, I pro­vided some fresh apples, lemons and other fruits as sen­sory trig­gers. This tac­tic proved to be quite help­ful to my nephew.

Wine Pairing with Food

I decided to let my nephew com­pare and con­trast 3 dif­fer­ent white wine vari­etals: ries­ling, sauvi­gnon blanc, and chardon­nay. We did so in a vari­ety of ways.

We smelled and tasted small sips from each glass on its own, and noted our impres­sions. I made him write down his com­ments on a piece of paper, to rein­force the activ­ity of pay­ing atten­tion to what he was see­ing, smelling or tast­ing. (His least favorite part of the evening…)

I had pre­pared a chicken dish that was mar­i­nated in the ries­ling, lemon juice, zest and slices along with fresh tar­ragon. I also served a potato dish and some veg­eta­bles that would­n’t fight the wines. For dessert we had a cus­tardy home­made bread pud­ding.

As expected, he pre­ferred the off-dry ries­ling. Because we used sev­eral dif­fer­ent ways to appre­ci­ate the wines, my nephew learned that his reac­tion to each glass dif­fered based on:

• The sequence in which he tasted them;
• Whether he was tast­ing each wine on its own, or with food;
• How much time had elapsed since the wines were first poured;
• Whether or not he had cleansed his palate before tast­ing the next wine.

He learned that what he liked on its own was not nec­es­sar­ily what he liked best with food, and vice versa. He did­n’t really enjoy the chardon­nay except when he tasted it with the cus­tardy bread pud­ding.

My nephew noted that sauvi­gnon blanc, a wine he found too bit­ter and astrin­gent on its own, paired well with the lemony chicken — and that he quite liked it when served with the right dish.

We both enjoyed the evening. His par­ents (who got the report after­wards) were amazed that my nephew was thor­oughly engaged in the expe­ri­ence for over an hour — until it was time for him to watch Game 5 of Bru­ins-Black­hawks series.

For a diehard Bru­ins fan like my nephew, what could com­pete with Game 5?