Wine Tasting Made Easy

You un-bung one of your barrels, thief a little wine out into your glass, and bring it up to your nose for a sniff and a taste. Immediately a little voice in the back of your mind (speaking with a nasally Frenchified accent, to be sure) pipes up: “Excuse moi, garçon, but you can’t possibly be doing that right. I scoff at your so-called wine savvy, you son of a used-car salesman.” And you sheepishly begin to imagine that, well, since you don’t have a grandiose chateau, property in Burgundy, or at the very least a sommelier’s license, you probably don’t even know how to hold the glass the right way, not to mention taste wine in the “correct” manner. But stop right there. The great secret of the world’s wine-jockeys is this: Underneath all the funny words, 100-point scales, and fanciful wine descriptions lies a straightforward and easily understood system of evaluating wines that can be used to assess a Chateau Margaux Grand Cru just as well as a Chateau Smith Ragin’ Good Red. Wine is wine — and