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| The Course |
| Introduction to the course |
Wine? But what is wine?
You're probably already sitting down. So, if you have a bottle of wine in the
house, open it. Right now it does not matter what sort of wine it is. Pour yourself
a glass and get ready, if you feel like it, for a brief introduction to a wine-tasting
course which will guide you into the magical world of wine.
Even the very
earliest peoples saw wine as magical; drunkenness due to wine was actually considered
to be a way of getting close to the gods. We do not want you to get drunk but,
on the contrary, to help you discover wine from the right perspective, neither
as the heavy drinker's inseparable companion nor as an élitist product
just for a few snobs. We would like to convey a love for this product, which is
a gift from the earth and one with an extremely long history; to show you that
a glass of wine represents the work of men and their struggle with, and sometimes
against, nature.
We shall explain how, where and when wine is produced. We
shall teach you to recognise a wine's character from its colour and aroma, even
before you have tasted it. We shall suggest how, when and with what to drink it
as well as how, when and why to refuse it. In short, we wish to give you a background
which, while not overwhelming, will certainly be enough to help you understand
a great deal and to know exactly what you are drinking.
And talking of this:
what does a bottle of wine contain? Most of it is water (78-85%) and sugar (including
the ethyl alcohol, which is classed as a sugary substance) and there are smaller
quantities of thousands of substances which give the wine its personality.
They are extremely valuable indicators of the wine's quality and state of health
which are assessed by means of what is known as an organoleptic test. This is
maybe a rather high-sounding expression for an action which you are used to performing
every time you taste a glass of wine, just as you have probably seen it performed
many times, maybe to your amusement, by people who were very carefully assessing
the colour of the wine, its clarity, trying to find ways to describe aromas which
are well known as well as those which are not so well known. It is not a game
- or rather, it can become one - but it has a serious basis.
The colour of
the wine can tell us about its age and the stage it has reached in its development,
just as the bouquet or aromas which it
gives off can tell us about its condition, the grape variety and the way the wine
was made. The reference to well-known smells is just one way to communicate ideas
which we can all imagine which actually correspond to well-defined chemical substances;
it makes more impact to say that this wine smells of tobacco rather than give
the name of the chemical which is responsible for the tobacco aroma.
This
short course, then, will teach you to judge the colour, bouquet and taste - along
with many other things - but you can learn the first rule straight away: if the
colour is clear and attractive, the wine smells clean and pleasant and the taste
is pleasing then what you are drinking is already a good wine.
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