Wine can taste crisp, fruity, creamy, spicy, earthy, or bold depending on the grape variety, climate, and how it’s made. Learning how to taste wine helps you recognize these differences and discover the styles you enjoy most. In this guide, we’ll explain what wine tastes like, how to drink wine, and the 5 S’s of wine tasting.
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What Does Wine Taste Like
Wine doesn’t have one taste; it exists on a spectrum. It can be crisp and refreshing like biting into a green apple, rich and creamy like vanilla custard, juicy like fresh berries, or savory with notes of herbs, pepper, leather, or earth. Wine is meant to be fun, not intimidating. There are no right or wrong answers. The only good wine is the wine you enjoy drinking.
Wine begins in the vineyard. The grape variety matters, but so do the climate, soil, elevation, farming practices, harvest timing, and the decisions made in the winery. Together, they shape a wine’s aromas, flavors, texture, and personality.
That’s what makes wine so fascinating. The same grape variety can taste completely different depending on where it’s grown and how it’s made. A common thing we hear is, “I hate Chardonnay.” More often than not, people simply haven’t found the style they enjoy. An unoaked Chardonnay from Chablis can be crisp, mineral-driven, and citrusy, while an oak-aged Chardonnay may be rich, buttery, and creamy. They’re made from the same grape, yet they taste remarkably different.
There are thousands of grape varieties and countless styles of winemaking, which means there’s always something new to discover. That’s why we encourage people to keep an open mind. If you think you don’t like a particular grape, chances are you just haven’t found the style that’s right for you.
Looking for the best wine for beginners? Start with our guide to the most popular wine varieties, where you’ll learn what each grape tastes like, whether it’s light or full-bodied, and which wines are easiest for new wine drinkers.
To make things easier, let’s look at the five major wine styles and the flavors they’re typically known for. Keep in mind that these are general tendencies; every wine is different.
Sparkling Wine
Sparkling wines are known for their refreshing bubbles and lively acidity. They often taste of citrus, green apple, pear, or stone fruit, while traditional-method sparkling wines like Champagne may develop notes of brioche, toast, or almonds with age. Most sparkling wines are crisp and refreshing, though they range from bone-dry to sweet.
White Wine
White wines span one of the widest flavor spectrums in the wine world. At one end, you’ll find light, crisp wines bursting with citrus and green apple. At the other are rich, creamy wines with notes of vanilla, butter, and toasted oak.
Orange Wine
Orange wine is made from white grapes, but unlike most white wines, the juice is fermented with the grape skins. This creates a fuller body, a deeper amber color, and a unique flavor profile with notes of dried citrus, apricot, tea, herbs, honey, nuts, and gentle tannins. It can be an acquired taste, but many wine lovers enjoy its complexity and food-friendly character.
Rosé Wine
Rosé is typically fresh, fruity, and refreshing, with flavors of strawberry, raspberry, watermelon, peach, citrus, and sometimes delicate floral notes. While many people assume rosé is sweet, most quality rosés are actually dry. They range from light and crisp to richer, more textured styles, making them one of the most versatile wines for warm weather and food pairing.
Red Wine
Red wines range from light and elegant to bold and powerful. Depending on the grape variety and style, you might taste red cherry, raspberry, plum, blackberry, blackcurrant, chocolate, pepper, herbs, tobacco, leather, or earthy notes. Some reds are soft and silky with gentle tannins, while others are full-bodied with a firmer, more structured finish. Like white wine, there’s tremendous diversity; if you don’t enjoy one red wine, it doesn’t mean you won’t love another.
Wine Doesn't Just Taste Different, It Feels Different
When people describe a wine, they’re often talking about more than just its flavors. Wine also has a unique mouthfeel. Learning these five characteristics will help you understand why two wines can taste completely different, even if they have similar fruit flavors.
Sweetness
Sweetness is usually the easiest characteristic to recognize. Some wines are bone-dry, meaning most of the grape sugar has been fermented into alcohol and very little residual sugar remains. Others are lusciously sweet. If a wine reminds you of honey, ripe peaches, or dessert, you’re probably noticing sweetness.
Acidity
Acidity gives wine its freshness and makes your mouth water, much like squeezing lemon on your tongue or biting into a crisp green apple. Wines with higher acidity feel bright, refreshing, and lively, while lower-acid wines tend to feel softer and rounder.
Tannins
Tannins are found mainly in red wines and create a drying sensation on your tongue and gums. If you’ve ever sipped strong black tea or bitten into an unripe banana, you’ve experienced tannins. They’re not a flavor but a texture, and they help give many red wines their structure.
Body
Body describes how heavy or light a wine feels in your mouth. Think of it like comparing skim milk to whole milk or cream. Light-bodied wines feel delicate and refreshing, while full-bodied wines are richer, more powerful, and coat your palate.
Alcohol
Alcohol contributes to a wine’s body and creates a gentle warming sensation, especially as you swallow. Higher-alcohol wines often feel richer and fuller, while lower-alcohol wines can seem lighter and more refreshing.
The next time you taste a wine, don’t just ask yourself, “What does it taste like?” Also ask, “How does it feel?” Paying attention to both flavor and how it feels in your mouth is one of the fastest ways to develop your palate.
How to Drink Wine
Wine has a unique way of bringing people together. It’s shared over dinners, celebrated at weddings, opened on anniversaries, and enjoyed with family and friends. One of the things we love most about wine is how it becomes part of a memory. Many people take home a favorite bottle from a trip to wine country, and months or even years later, opening that bottle brings them right back to the vineyard where they discovered it, the people they shared it with, and the memories they made along the way. Long after the bottle is empty, those experiences often last a lifetime.
Don’t stress too much about the ‘correct’ way to drink wine, a few simple tips can help you enjoy every glass a little more.
Choose a wine glass if you have one, as the bowl helps concentrate the wine’s aromas, but don’t worry if all you have is a regular glass. As you explore more wines, you’ll discover that the shape of the glass can have a surprisingly big impact on how a wine smells and tastes. Serve wine at the proper temperature, most white, rosé, and sparkling wines are best enjoyed chilled, while red wines are usually best served slightly below room temperature. Hold the glass by the stem whenever possible to avoid warming the wine with your hand.
Wine is at its best when it’s shared with good company and great food. Pairing wine with a meal can transform the experience, with the right combination making both the food and the wine taste even better.
Most importantly, don’t get caught up in rules or what others think you should like. Explore different grape varieties, regions, and styles, trust your own palate, and remember: the best wine isn’t the most expensive bottle or the one critics score the highest, it’s the one you genuinely enjoy drinking.
How to Taste Wine
The Five S’s of Wine Tasting
If you’ve ever been wine tasting or watched any movies where people have been wine tasting, you may have seen someone making a show of it – looking intently into the glass, swirling enthusiastically, taking a long, deep whiff of the wine with their noses deep in the glass, slurping and gurgling the wine and spending a few moments analyzing everything they just experienced.
While it may sometimes look pretentious – there are good reasons for each of these steps that help to relay important information about the wine you’re tasting.
Even Master Sommeliers follow these basic steps and whether you’re a novice or experienced wine taster you too can follow these easy steps to develop your wine tasting skills, learn about your palate and appreciate the nuances of different wines.
See
Just by looking at your wine you can learn a lot about the wine that is in your glass, before you even smell or taste it.
It’s best to hold your glass at an angle in front of a white surface, since this will allow you to observe the density of the wines color.
Wine color is mostly affected by the grape variety, the age of the wine and whether or not the wine spent time in a new oak barrel. Look at the depth of the color, is the wine watery and pale or deep and dark.
White wines vary from clear through light green and all shades of yellow to deep golden brown. White wines naturally gain color as they age.
Red wines vary from red, ruby to purple, garnet and brick. Red wines naturally lose color and begin to brown as they age.
Observe the clarity of the wine, is the wine clear and brilliant or cloudy and dull. Cloudiness can point towards unfiltered wines or could be an indication the wine might be off.
Look at the depth of the color. Certain varieties in general will be less concentrated than others. Compare a Pinot Noir with a Petite Sirah for example. This should give you a good indication of whether the wine is going to be bigger and bolder, or lighter and more delicate.
Swirl
Before you give your glass a good swirl, stick your nose in there to smell the wine first. You’ll want to have a comparison for what the wine smelled like before and after your swirl, since introducing oxygen into the wine will help open it up and release various aromas.
After you’ve taken a good sniff, gently swirl the wine around in your glass. If you struggle, you can draw circles on the table. Swirling increases the wine’s contact with air and intensifies its aromas. Introducing oxygen also allows the wine to ‘open up’ and soften the tannins in big red wines that have been recently opened. Ideally at home, most wine should be opened at least an hour before it’s consumed.
While you’re swirling, you’ll also want to look at the ‘legs’ on the wine, or how the wine coats the side of the glass. This can tell you more about the viscosity or the body of the wine. If the “legs” trickle down slowly, it has more body. If it falls down in sheets, it has less body. Legs are not an indicator of quality. But could be an indicator of alcohol. More body could hint at higher alcohol levels, which might mean the fruit was sourced from a warmer climate.
More body can also indicate some residual sugar in the wine.
Smell
The smell of the wine is often referred to as its nose. They say that 10% of what you’re going to taste is influenced by sight, 20% by taste and 70% is based on what you smell, so this is an important step. You can often smell different fruits, spices, herbs and flowers. And don’t worry, people smell different things in the same wine and there are hundreds of smells in wine, so there isn’t a right or wrong answer.
And if you smell sherry (in a red wine), vinegar, wet cardboard, or sulfur – that may mean the wine has a fault or is no longer good.
In white wines you can smell from apple/pear to citrus to more tropical notes, where in red wine you can pick up red, black and blue fruit.
Some aromas that are often associated with common varieties are:
Chardonnay: pear, apple, peach, apricot, vanilla, lemon, melon, pineapple and other tropical fruit, honey
Sauvignon Blanc: grass, herbs, grapefruit, pear, gooseberry, lime, lemon, olive
Gewurztraminer and Riesling: grapefruit, apricot, lime, mint, melon, peach, lilac, jasmine, cinnamon, cloves
Viognier: flowers, lemon, honeysuckle and nectarine
Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot: blackberry, raspberry, cherry, plum, black currant, chocolate, coffee, tea, tobacco, cedar, bell pepper, mint, smoke, nuts
Pinot Noir: raspberry, strawberry, cranberry, violet, rose
Zinfandel and Syrah: black currant, blackberry, pomegranate, plum, lavender, black peppercorn, wet wood, earthiness
Sangiovese: raspberry, cherry, plum, anise, olive
Unfortunately, sometimes you might encounter an “off smell”. These smells include:
- Sherry: the wine has oxidized from age or improper storage.
- Vinegar: the wine contains excessive acetic acid.
- Cork/Mustiness/wet cardboard: a defective or inferior cork has affected the wine.
- Sulfur: the wine contains excessive sulfur dioxide, it could also be a reduced wine, and exposing it to oxygen will burn off the sulfur smell.
If you smell woody or vanilla characteristics, that may indicate that there was some aging in new oak barrels.
Sip
Finally – the step that most people skip to directly!
The taste is a combination of smell and flavor – roll the wine across your taste buds since you’ll taste sweetness, sour/acid, saltiness and bitter on different parts of your tongue.
Observe the mouthfeel of the wine, does the wine feel thin or is it a full bodied wine that coats your mouth. Both alcohol and glycerol affect the weight of a wine.
Acidity is responsible for your mouth starting to water. Acidity gives the wine crispness and freshness, and without good acidity the wine is flat and sour. Most commonly acidity in wine is associated with white wines, but it’s a very important component in red wines as well and is what can make them age-worthy.
Tannin will dry out your mouth and is often experienced as a bitter taste, coming mainly from the grape skins and seeds, though they could come from the barrel as well. Tannins are essential to the finish of a wine, and are mainly experienced in red wines.
Tannin can taste astringent, hard, dry or soft. Many people describe tannin as ‘Dry’ – however a dry wine refers to wine with no or little residual sugar.
Most wines you’ll encounter in Paso Robles will be considered dry wines, which means there is little to no residual sugar.
Some fruitier wines can be experienced as sweet, but we call that fruit-forward, since there is no residual sugar. A wine is sweet if it contains unfermented grape sugars. In California it is illegal to add sugar (chaptalize) to wine after fermentation.
Ultimately, the flavors of the wine (acidity, tannin, fruit-forward characteristics, etc) are dependent on the variety, growing conditions and winemaking techniques.
Be sure to take a few sips of wine before you judge it.
Have you ever heard someone say ‘Sip Sip Hooray’?
This refers to the fact that the third sip of wine is the one that really counts, since your palate has finally adjusted to that specific wine.
Savor or Spit
Now is the time to think about the wine your tasting.
Do you notice the aftertaste or finish? A good finish will linger on your palate for quite some time and will reflect the flavors of the wine.
Did you like the wine? You can say things about the body of the wine, how long did the flavor last and was it sweet, acidic, tannic or fruity.
Remember, wine tasting is a personal experience, and everyone’s palate is unique. What you taste and enjoy may differ from what others taste and enjoy and that’s Ok!
But by following these simple steps, you can learn more about your specific palate and appreciate each wine you try even more than you may have otherwise.
Want to put your new skills into practice? Download our free printable wine tasting sheet and use it to record the appearance, aromas, flavors, mouthfeel, and overall impression of each wine you taste. It’s a fun way to compare wines, build your palate, and discover what you truly enjoy.
Your Wine Journey
Don’t compare yourself with others. Everyone’s wine journey is different, and that’s what we love about it.
It often begins with a single bottle, somewhere along the way comes the moment that changes everything, the first time you discover a wine you didn’t expect to love. It’s the moment we hear guests say, “I’ve never tasted wine like this before.”
From there, you discover a style you enjoy, visit your first winery, learn how to taste wine, compare different grape varieties and regions, and gradually develop your palate.
Before long, you’re introducing friends to your favorite wines, planning trips to wine country, and creating memories that last far longer than the bottle itself.
After more than 15 years of leading tours, we’ve had the privilege of watching thousands of guests begin, or continue, that journey. We’ve seen people arrive saying they “don’t like Chardonnay” or “only drink sweet wine,” only to discover an entirely new side of wine by tasting different styles side by side.
One of the greatest joys of what we do is watching that moment of discovery, because learning about wine isn’t about becoming an expert, it’s about becoming more curious. Every bottle tells a story, and every tasting is an opportunity to discover something new.
Reading about wine is a great start, but nothing develops your palate faster than tasting wines side by side.
Whether you’re exploring your local wine region or planning a trip to Paso Robles, comparing different grape varieties, climates, and winemaking styles is the quickest way to discover what you truly enjoy.
- Planning your first tasting? Check out our blog Beginner’s Guide to Wine Tasting in Paso Robles
- Wondering if a guided tour is worth it? Check out our blog Are Wine Tours Worth It?
- Ready to pair wine with dinner? Check out our blog Ultimate Food & Wine Pairing Guide
