The art of tasting the wine is naturally as old as the art of wine-making itself. Nowadays the activity of wine taster has turned in an appreciated career for some. If the ancient people used to taste wine before they consumed it now we have experts that taste the wine for us and tell us which wine is better than the other.
One of the challenges of this job is to be able to translate the taste of wine into language. Greeks used different words to describe wine but today with so many more wines to elaborate upon describing the taste of a wine is a real challenge. Sometimes, fruit, flowers and vegetables are used as a reference. Some experts use the smell of food to describe the wines. As Victoria Moore advises in one of the Guardians articles, the terrifyingly organised Angela Mount applies the same exactitude to the discussion of food smells in wine. She describes the taste of Zonte’s Footstep Shiraz Viognier 2004 as figs and baked apricot, cooked in the oven with a few dabs of butter.”
Another challenging part of the wine taster job is the ability to spit or gob. Victoria Moore helps us again with information about this difficult ability to gain. In...