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How-To: Become a Wine Expert from the Comfort of Your Kitchen Bar
Grant Reynolds, award-winning sommelier and author of How to Drink Wine, instructs us on developing our wine palate in our own homes.
Does the amount of wine you’ve consumed recently have you feeling like a sommelier but you still can’t tell a Bardolino from a Beaujolais? Time for a little at-home education. That way, the next time you’re out at a restaurant and the server asks if you prefer a full-bodied red with notes of tobacco and black pepper or a dry, fruity red with hints of spicy blackberries, you can answer confidently.
I’ll never forget the first time someone asked me what a wine tasted like. I was 16, disinterested in almost everything in life, and working at a pizza place that only served four different wines: a pinot grigio, a chardonnay, and two reds that, to this day, I believe were the same wine with different labels and strategically different price points. While my first thought when asked this question was, “Lady, you’re in the wrong place if you want a nice glass of wine,” what I said was, “Dry.” At this point in life, my run-ins with wine were primarily driven by the ease with which I could steal it from the fridge without my mother busting me, so I didn’t have much to go on. I remember a more senior waiter using the term, so I figured I’d give it a shot. The woman said, “Great, I only like dry wines, so I was just checking.” In that moment, I up-sold her from $12 to $14 and felt quite proud.
Something in that interaction sparked my interest, and I became compelled to figure out exactly what every wine tastes like, beyond the overused clichés. If you’ve ever felt like your own wine palate could use some coaching, there may be no better time than the present to start gathering information. Identifying flavors in classic wines you already have around the house is a great way to begin, and from there, the world is your wine cellar.
Wine Tasting Tips to Understand What You Like
- It’s All in the Fruit: All wines taste like some sort of fruit. If it’s a light red, think of berries, and if it’s a darker red, think of prunes and plums. If it’s a crisp white, think of citrus and herbs, and if it’s an oaky white, think of honey and apples.
- Spice It Up: Look out for spicy flavors as those are the ones we tend to remember best. Does the wine smell like black pepper? Vanilla? Jalapeño?
- Savor the Flavor: While all wines have fruit, there are other savory flavors lurking in your favorite bottles. Look out for the taste of mushrooms, olives, peppers, bacon, and even dirt. (Is dirt savory?)
A Few Great Wines for Any Occasion
Great Wines to Bring to a Party
“Party” is a pretty broad term. We’re going to generally define this as a gathering of friends and acquaintances at someone’s house, where home-cooked food of a generally acceptable level will be served. We’re not talking about a college kegger or a rave in a field, nor are we talking about a friend who brought a chef over from Lyon to cook in her vacation château. This is your basic, run-of-the-mill dinner party. Knowing that, it’s still a pretty broad situation. You could really bring anything. But we do think there are some guidelines that will ensure success.
- Rioja: This probably isn’t the time to get spendy at the wine shop or bust out something special from your stash at home. You don’t want to be the person who brought an expensive bottle to a dinner party when everyone else went for something affordable. Spanish wines are a good move, particularly Rioja, which demonstrates good value for the price point.
- Sancerre: Sancerre is the cargo shorts of wine. It’s not sexy, but it’s useful in the right situation.
- Jura or Mencía: It’s all but certain that there will be a lot of pinot noir and sauvignon blanc arriving with other guests, which presents an opportunity for you to share something interesting with the group. Wines from the Jura region of France are unique and almost always affordable, or you could go for something like an affordable Spanish red from the Mencía grape.
- A Magnum of Beaujolais: Everybody loves a magnum, and you can find reasonably priced, big bottles of Beaujolais for around $50. That’s the right kind of going big for this situation.
Pizza Wines
One of life’s most desirable situations is eating a bunch of pizza with a bunch of friends, or without them. If you’re lucky, you’ll find yourself in this situation often and choosing what to drink probably doesn’t stress you out much because pizza tastes good both with everything and with nothing. That said, there are some especially great wines to drink with pizza.
- Barbera: Barbera is great with pizza. It’s versatile enough to please most people, as it’s full-bodied but doesn’t drink like a “big” wine, and it’s affordable.
- Côtes du Rhône: A wine like Côtes du Rhône is really just meant to be a thing to drink with your food, not something to swirl in your glass and talk about. If there’s a red wine to drink out of a red Solo cup, this is the one—don’t feel bad about it.
- Southern Italian Reds: Pizza didn’t originate in New York or Chicago. It came from Southern Italy, and one foolproof rule of pairing food and wine is to drink wine from the same place the food is from. Before Pompeii was buried in ash, people were sitting on ancient stoops drinking wine and eating some version of pizza. Montepulciano d’Abruzzo and nero d’Avola are easy-to-find wines from the birthplace of pizza.
Beach Day Wines
Believe it or not, there are great wines for you to drink on the beach besides rosé. In fact, we can think of a whole range of whites to perfectly complement your turkey sandwich and a few grains of sand. Finding bottles with screw tops instead of corks adds that extra layer of convenience. Just don’t drink red wine at the beach—purp mouth paired with a bathing suit may have you looking like a polar bear that just ate a seal.
- Rosé: At the beach, we’d put rosé and light beer in the same category. You’re probably drinking it really cold, and you’re probably drinking a lot of it. And that’s perfectly acceptable.
- Easy-Drinking White Wines: Almost any white wine will work on a hot day in the sun, but we’re particularly partial to wines that taste sort of like margaritas—citrusy and salty. Sauvignon blanc, Muscadet, and Chablis all fit squarely into this category and therefore into your beach bag.
Sweater Weather Wines
We also like to call these “meat on your bones” wines. Imagine the sensation of drinking meatloaf on a frozen February evening, except not disgusting. These are the wines that will warm your soul and help you survive the hibernation season.
- Syrah: Syrah tastes like bacon. Bacon is delicious. Especially when it’s cold out. You do the math.
- Nebbiolo: Nebbiolo grapes are interesting because they produce a lighter wine that often drinks like a full-bodied wine. Barolo is particularly notable for this characteristic. This is a good thing if you’re someone who prefers not to drink cab, but still wants something that will warm your bones.
- Cabernet Sauvignon: Cook yourself a steak, pour yourself some cab, and ideally sit in some sort of leather chair. If none of those things is compatible with your earth-conscious lifestyle, feel free to substitute the steak with a fire-roasted root vegetable, and a leather chair with any chair—as long as it has a large dog next to it.
Brunch Wines
Let’s start with this: Brunch does not have to be bottomless, and if you really want to know our opinion, it should never be. Bottoms are good. They keep us grounded. Any bottomless brunch situation is one in which you’re being served very cheap Champagne mixed with orange juice, and/or very cheap vodka mixed with tomato juice. You can do better.
- Sparkling Wines: Champagne and sparkling wines are great with a midday weekend meal that may or may not include eggs. Bubbles are crowd-pleasers, and reasonably priced options are available and delicious enough that you don’t even have to mix them with juice to make them palatable.
- Rosé: Already a brunch-time staple, rosé is an easy-drinking, all-day kind of wine. Proceed as usual.
- Low-Alcohol Wines: If this is your first meal of the day, alcohol percentage matters. At brunch, you want it below 13%. Not just because you’ll end up slightly less hammered after a few rounds and a few quiches, although that certainly helps. Low-alcohol wines will also taste fresher, which is what you want on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Keep it fresh.
Wines to Gift
So it’s your boss’s birthday, or your parents’ anniversary, or your boss’s parents’ anniversary. Basically, you need to get something special, but you also don’t have $2,000 to spend. What do you do? Buying wines from a specific year that has meaning is fun—maybe the year someone got married or had a baby. Birth-year vintages are great, too, though your more . . . mature . . . friends are going to cost you some money in that scenario. You can find good-value, collectible wines in certain regions that don’t cost thousands or even hundreds of dollars. These are places where if you’re buying wine for someone who knows more about wine than you, you’ll be safe, as they are almost ubiquitously recognized as the best spots.
- Champagne: You don’t have to open a bottle of Dom Pérignon to mark a memorable occasion, though if you want to, we won’t stop you. There are plenty of special options from the Champagne region that sit in the $50 to $100 range. Instead of buying something just because it has an orange label, ask for Grower Champagne, which is usually from the smaller producers. You’ll look like a pro.
- Red and White Burgundy: Burgundy wines are some of the most sought after in the world, and as a result, they are also some of the most expensive. You could easily spend thousands of dollars on a single bottle. But you can also find gift-worthy stuff that won’t cost you nearly that much. Ask for wines from Volnay, Morey-Saint-Denis, Saint-Aubin, or Meursault, which tend to be the better-value parts of Burgundy. You should be able to get a great bottle for under $100.
- Barolo: If you hand a bottle of Barolo to someone who knows what they are doing, their eyebrows will rise because they will be both happy and surprised to learn that you know what you are doing, too. It’s a classic, but not the most obvious, and you can get something great between $30 and $60.
- Bordeaux: This is the safest bet. It’s like putting something (anything) in a Tiffany box. Think of Bordeaux as the wine you buy for someone you would have otherwise given a tie to. The price range is infinite, so you can always find something that matches whatever amount you want to spend.
Wines to Drink by Yourself
Whoever said it’s bad to drink alone has clearly never had a good night in with a bottle of wine, a movie, and a space devoid of other humans. Solitude pairs well with pretty much anything. And by the way, you don’t have to drink the whole bottle in one sitting, you know? But we won’t judge you if you do.
- California Cabernet: This is a great wine to drink if you’re in the mood to fall asleep on the couch. The high alcohol content will bring on the sweet grip of slumber like a warm tannic hug.
- Red Burgundy: If you’re drinking red Burgundy alone, you’ve done something right with your life. Celebrate yourself. It’s a bit lighter in alcohol, so it might be better for one of those nights when you’re determined to finish a movie, a trashy book, or your manuscript without falling asleep.
- Half Bottles: Half bottles are exactly what they sound like: tiny bottles containing one-half of the amount of wine you would find in a typical 750ml bottle. You won’t find a ton of half bottles out there in the world, but they do exist, and they’re the perfect size if you’re drinking alone.
Spicy Food Wines
This is one situation where the type of wine you drink really does interact with the food you’re eating in a meaningful way. You want to drink low-alcohol wines with spicy food. Why? Because they’ll be fresh and play nicely with other flavors like the citrus and herbs you often find in spicy food.
- Riesling: Riesling works with spicy food because it tends to contain more sugar than other whites, but not as much as a dessert wine. That sugar helps balance out the spice. It’s like drinking a glass of milk when your mouth is on fire—except it’s wine and not milk and who over the age of seven still drinks milk with dinner?
- Champagne: As with Riesling, there is normally a little bit of sweetness to help combat the heat. Also, the bubbles are designed to make you drink faster, so it’s quenching.
- Beaujolais: Beaujolais is a red wine that acts like a white one. It’s tangy, easy to drink, and tastes like spices, so the match works well.
