Wine Tasting: A Simple Framework to Evaluate Wine

“I just know if I like a wine or not, but I can’t tell you why,” is a common refrain that I hear from visitors to my winery’s tasting room or virtual tastings.

To help, I developed The Et Fille Wine Tasting Framework, a simple tool for evaluating what it is you like or do not like, about a wine.

To be clear, this is not a deductive tasting method like you would learn with Wine Spirits and Education Trust (WSET) or Court of Master Sommeliers (CMS) to hypothesize what a wine’s varietal, region, producer, and vintage is when tasting blind. Instead, this is meant to help you break down wine tasting into discrete evaluative measures.

Wine Tasting: The Measurement

The framework consists of four criteria. Your only job is to assign a preference score to each on a scale of 1-10 (with 1 being “I strongly dislike this” and 10 being “I strongly like this”). Therefore, we are simply breaking down our preferences along with evaluative criteria.

For those that come from a scientific or quantitative background like I do, note that this is a subjective measure that does not provide external validation for the evaluation. We care about intra-rater reliability, but not interrater reliability. For example, we are merely concerned that your score of a 7 always means the same thing to you each time you use it, not that your 7 agrees with your friend’s or an expert’s score.

Jessica Mozeico Winemaker and Owner of Et Fille Wines in Newberg, Oregon — Wine Tasting 101

The secret to tasting wine like a true Professional. Written by Et Fille Wine’s Winemaker and Owner Jessica Mozeico

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Wine Tasting: The Criteria

Fragrance- The aroma, nose, or bouquet of a wine is what you smell. Two factors to consider are the nose’s intensity (does it jump out of the glass before it’s up to your nose, or does it really make you work and swirl it many times before getting a sense of its fragrance?) and complexity (does it smell like only one note, such as black cherry, or does it have multiple layers of scents?).

We may want to make qualitative notes of what we are smelling and it is helpful to break this down into fruit, floral, herbal, spice, and earth aromas.

Flavor- The taste of the wine, or what you sense when you take a sip, can also be evaluated for intensity and complexity. Here, too, we can identify the tastes by prompting for fruit, floral, herbal/spice, and earth notes. Often, the easiest place to start is with the primary fruit characteristics or those that come from the grape varietal.

In red wines, for example, the most common are red fruit (e.g., raspberry, cranberry, strawberry, red cherry) and black fruit (e.g., blackberry, black cherry, black currant). In white wines, the most common are tree or stone fruits (e.g., peach, apple, pear) and citric fruit (e.g., lemon, grapefruit, orange). Wine Folly provides a helpful pictorial summary.

Feel- We can ask three questions when considering the wine’s mouthfeel. First, what is the weight of the wine? We can characterize it as light, medium, or full-bodied by thinking about the analogy that if it were milk, would we could classify it as skim, low-fat, or full-fat milk? Second, what is the texture of the wine in our mouth- smooth and silky or prickly and edgy?

An analogy is that if the wine were a blanket, would it be a scratchy airline blanket or a soft chenille throw? Third, does the wine have structure or does it seem flabby or dull? We are thinking of the weight, texture, and structure of each wine when assessing its mouthfeel.

Finish- This is often the most objective measurement as we simply pay attention to whether the flavor lingers in our mouth after swallowing. We time whether we sense flavor after 30 seconds or longer and we think about whether the flavor remains constant or if we can identify any additional notes as time goes on.

For example, if we can still taste the wine 45 seconds after swallowing it and the black cherry flavor gives way to spice characteristics, that is likely a long and complex finish.

Wine Tasting: The Framework

Wine Tasting 101 - The Four F’s by Et Fille Wines in Newberg, Oregon

Wine Tasting: Other Wine Tasting Tips

There are two other tips when using this framework. First, recognize that palates are uniquely our own and are informed by past experience with scents and flavors.

For example, if I smell a wine and it reminds me of apple pie baking, that may have a positive connotation for me because I remember going to my grandmother’s home and the pie she always had baking for my arrival on those nurturing trips. If you never had this experience, you may not get apple pie baking from that same wine, nor would you have a strong positive association with that smell.

Second, always open two wines of a similar type to try together. I’m not advocating that you drink twice as much, but that you open two wines of the same region or varietal at the same time to compare because our brains are wired to identify contrast. It’s easier to assign a feel score of 7 to one wine if we know it’s a 3 for another wine.

Remember, there’s no pressure to finish a bottle of wine after opening it immediately as a cork can go back in a bottle of wine more easily than it came out, so cork the wines and see how they evolve the next night.

Wine Tasting: In Summary

The Et Fille Wine Tasting Framework is summarized in this graphic and we suggest using it to compare 2+ wines of a certain type. The key is to slow down and pay attention to the Four Fs to dissect what we like, or not, about a wine.

Observe what the high points and low points of each wine are for you and, most importantly, have fun.