There are just too many options. The wine lists seem endless. If you are not yet a wine expert, choosing a good wine might be tricky.
To know if you like the taste of a wine is easy. Knowing why you like it is a different story. Do you know how to describe your preferred wine? Can you tell if it’s light or full bodied? Is it sweet or fruity? Is it a low tannin or high tannin wine?
To help you get through this, here are some tips in choosing the right wine for you:
What do you prefer, white wine or red wine? Decide on what you really like- red, white, sparkling, fortified, or dessert wine? This will help in narrowing down your options.
Decide on your wine preferences
Dry or sweet wine. Would you rather have sweet or dry wine? A wine minus the sweetness is called a “dry wine”.
High tannins versus low tannins.Tannins are important elements in wines. It is produced from skins, stalks, and pips of grapes. These produce bitter taste in young wines.
Long Palate versus Short Palate. This refers to the length of time the aroma and taste stay after drinking the wine. In most cases, the longer it persists, the better.
Full, Medium, or Light Bodied. The body of a wine is directly relative to its alcohol percentage.
7.5% to 10.5% – light body
10.5% to 12.5% – medium body
12.5% and up – full body
Heavy or No oak at all. In Australia, American, German, and French oak barrels are widely used to give complex flavors. To express good qualities of oaks, the terms vanilla, smoky, cedary, and toasty are used while green cedar, burnt, charred, plywood, and lumber refer to its distasteful side.
Buy wine online only from a reputable online boutique.It is vital to purchase your wines only from online stores that take good care of their wines. The wines should not be exposed to extreme weather or direct sunlight. It is also essential that the online store offers money back guarantee.
Explore the diversity and variety of Australian produced wines. Experiment with different kinds of Australian produced wines. You may want to try Pinot Noir instead of Shiraz, or Sauvignon Blanc instead of Chardonnay. The more wines you have tasted the better you will understand different wine characteristics.
To summarize, you have to trust your own taste buds in buying wines. When a friend says a wine is good, it does not mean you will like it, too. In the same way, when someone says a specific kind of wine is not good, don’t tend to shy away from it. You are the only one who can judge if a wine is good for you.
