French Wine – 5 tips to taste French wine

French wine is popular all over the world because it has so much grapes varieties and history, as long as skilled people growing it for a long time. The typical localization of the country, the climate, microclimate, and different factors offers tasty wines to go with every dish! For some, wine is a mystery. Actually, it will remain if you don’t taste and get interested enough to it. But wine is not that difficult to taste or enjoy! Simple steps and you will be able to enjoy wine the best!

  • Look

The first thing do to is to poor wine in a glass and look at the color. You will usually use a good bright environment so that the color is not altered by a yellow bulb light or by darkness. Using a white sheet of paper under the glass of wine to see the transparency of the wine color is a good idea. By the look, you can get a first impression about the wine age, and sometimes the alcoholic degree.

  • Smell

Smell is really important. Actually when you eat and drink something the nose help to taste the flavor in the mouth. If we wouldn’t use our nose all the food we eat would be tasteless. The first time you smell, you don’t need to swirl the wine. First smell

  • Smell again!

When you smelled once. Now you can take the glass firmly and swirl the wine then smell it again. (we call this “le deuxième nez”). You will be amazed how different the two times can be. Sometimes we don’t get all the aromas without swirling. Sometimes the swirl doesn’t bring the extra flavors that we can expect.

You can play like this a few times, waiting a few seconds, to smell it without swirl, then swirl again. It will teach you a lot. And make you feel good!

Swirling doesn’t really fit with sparkling wines though!

  • Taste (and drink if you feel like it!)

By smelling, you might have recognized some flavors, typical for the kind of wine you are tasting and have an idea how the wine should taste. But by tasting it you can actually know its flavors. If your aim is to practice wine tasting, I would recommend to not swallow it (yes what a waste!). This way you cannot get drunk easily and your senses will be ready and not altered to tast all kind of wine (10 or more) in a single day! What a huge progression you can make in wine knowledge by NOT drinking it! 😀

When we taste wine, we usually aerate the wine by letting air enter the mouth. This is the famous move of wine amateurs and lovers, we inhale after we take a sip of wine. We call it “grumer”, like whistle reverse. It can take a few times to do it correctly, but you will never taste it a different way after. It just enhances the flavors so much! Try it!

  • Pair with good food!

In France we pay a particular attention to the food we eat along the wine we drink. Because the flavor is so different. Wine and food pairing is an art and a science. For your information, you can start with basics like white wine with fish and red one with red meat. But it is an entire world itself. The French meal and the different meal courses all go with different wines. There is a correct order to drink wine too. As so as cheese!

Some wine vocabulary in French:

  • Le vin (wine)
  • Le vignoble (vineyard)
  • Un verre (a glass)
  • Une bouteille (a bottle)
  • Sentir (to smell)
  • Déguster (to taste)
  • Accord mets et vins (Wine and food pairing)
  • Être saoûl (to be drunk)
  • Santé! (cheers!)

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