The Appearance of Wine
When being examined on wine tasting, the wines are poured blind. Marks for the exam are awarded in three main categories.
The first is appearance. By assessing a wine’s clarity you will start to formulate some ideas about what the wine might be and through these observations you gather some marks on your tasting paper.
The main point here is clarity: is the wine hazy or clear.
The next category is colour intensity. Is it a pale, medium or deep intensity of colour.
Finally, the colour itself: if it is white, is it lemon-green, lemon, gold, amber or brown.
If it is a rose wine, is it pink, salmon or orange colour.
And if it is red, is it purple, ruby, garnet, tawny or brown.
Additionally, there might be some observations you would want to note and these too will help you form a conclusion as to what the wine is.
So what makes the wine hazy or clear? Most often winemakers choose to fine and/or filter filter and a wine before it is bottled to ensure it is clear and to remove any microbes that might hinder the wine.
Hazy wines might not have been fully filtered or fined with products such as bentonite or egg whites. By not doing this, in the interest of naturally, the winemaker will choose not to remove anything from the wine though this can make the wine more vulnerable to faults.
In terms of colour intensity, depending on wether it is a red or white wine, as it ages, the intensity will either increase or decrease.
Red wines will often lose some colour and the rim of the wine might develop a brick orange hue. Conversely, a white wine that has been aged will almost certainly become deeper in colour. Both red and white wines will appear to have lost the vibrant colour from their youth and appear to be a little more dull.
In terms of the colour itself, a white wine with a slight hint of green would usually indicate that it has been grown in a cooler climate.
The colour of red wine comes from it skins. You can make a white wine from red grapes, with the classic example of Champagne where chardonnay is often complemented by one or two red grapes, pinot noir and pinot meunier.
The longer the grapes soak, or steep or in winespeak macerate, with their skins, the more colour, tannins and aromatics the wine will pick up. This maceration takes place during the primary alcoholic fermentation when the grapes’ sugars are converted into alcohol.
Some grapes such as cabernet sauvignon, have thick skins providing ample colour and tannins. While others like pinot noir have much thinner skins, not only making them more difficult to grow in certain climates, but also reducing the opportunity for colour development in the resulting wine.
Despite the colour, both red and white wines can be equally aromatic and in the hands of the right winemaker, have powerful tannins in their youth.
Finally, it is worth noting if the wine has any sediment, deposits such as wine crystals (which is tartaric acid that solidifies in some wines), or the presence of bubbles.
Many of these qualities result from the personal of the winemaker to fulfill a vision of how they want you, the consumer, to enjoy the fruits of their labour.