Maybe you aren’t expert for wines, but it’s very useful to know which attributes make wine of high quality. Did you know that the practice of wine tasting dates from 14th century? Of course, in 14th century people didn’t use constantly-evolving formal terminology to describe the wide range of general characteristics of wines like today, modern, professional wine tasters often do.
For tasting wine you need all your senses. First step is checking out appearance. The color and clarity of wine are very important and they tell us a lot about wine we taste. While you are looking at a glass of wine, pay attention to whether there is some sediment. Also check out if the wine is opaque. You should know that an older red wine will be more translucent than younger red wines.
After you have checked appearance of your wine, check wine aroma with your sense of smell. Before you smell it, gently swirl your glass. If you swirl your glass, you are going to get better first impression about a wine.
Then you should make your mouth sensations. After you did all this steps, you can verify your wine.
When someone is trying to compare two or more similar wines, he must know which vintages are wines coming from. If you own a winery and you want to arrange a test between two wines of the same wine type, but from different vintages, you will have to make a vertical tasting. If you have two wines from same vintage but different wineries, you will have to try a horizontal tasting.