How To Taste Wine – Video Series (Ep. 3)

Written by Madeline Puckette

Learn wine tasting secrets used by sommeliers, wine buyers, and critics. Find out what you’ve been missing in every glass of wine you drink.

Having a great palate just takes practice.
In This Video

Learn how to taste and observe wine in order to better discern quality. This video walks you through the 4-step tasting method with a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon.

  1. Look
  2. Smell
  3. Taste
  4. Think

If there is one thing that separates a wine connoisseur from a neophyte, it’s the power of observation. This seems obvious enough, but learning to observe a wine is actually a bit of an awkward process.

Why? Well, so many of us don’t actually taste wine. We drink it.

Additionally, many of us haven’t really learned how to use the two sensory devices attached to our face. (Our noses and mouths!)

In fact, we rely so heavily on our eyes for taste that we’ve even named fruits after colors!

Wine Tasting is Mindfulness

When you learn to taste wine, you unlearn some bad habits that you never knew you had. For example, you’ll find yourself smelling your food more and sniffing fresh produce at the supermarket.

It might even change what you desire to eat.

The largest of these changes is acknowledging the existence of unlikable smells and tastes. Wine has quite a number of these unlikable notes, being a sour, fermented, and often bitter beverage.

In the pursuit of understanding wine’s tastes, you begin to let go of your childlike food preferences and grow into something a little more…adult.

Stages of Wine

Your Homework

Grab a bottle of bold red wine and practice tasting with the video above!


Wine Folly Magnum Edition front cover angle on white background

Get The Book

The companion to this series is the new Wine Folly Guide – completely redesigned and rebuilt from the ground up. This one has over two times the content of the first, bestselling book.

Written byMadeline Puckette

James Beard Award-winning author and Wine Communicator of the Year. I co-founded Wine Folly to help people learn about wine. @WineFolly