[MUSIC] Welcome back. I expect it by now you have printed out your two PDFs. Remember the first PDF is a tasting grid that has vocabulary in it, it has hints in it. And the second one is just a blank grid. A tasting grid or a tasting sheet, or sometimes called even a scoresheet, is really, really important because it guides our step-by-step progression of tasting each individual wine. It helps us remember to do everything, it helps us to remember not to skip steps. In other words, not to just plunge right in and drink the wine before we've looked at it and smelled it, and so forth. It helps us focus on that aspect of the wine sensory evaluation that we're considering at that specific moment. I always take notes, even if I don't have my tasting notebook or a fancy grid sheet with me. I'll grab a paper napkin and take notes on that paper napkin. And then when I get at home, I'll tape it in my tasting notebook. Of course, I don't always take notes at dinner parties or over to someone's house for dinner, but I always do stop and think about the wine. Focus on the wine before I taste it. I want to be able to have a memory of that wine. And fairly quickly, once you get the hang of this, you can go through your whole sensory routine whether or not you take notes. But I do recommend that taking notes whenever you can. So let's have a look at your first PDF, the wine tasting where it has hints in it. And I'll just walk you through each of the steps. And a little bit later in this module, we're actually going to taste together going through this various steps. Our first section is our visual evaluation of wine. We're going to be looking at wine, we're going to be tipping our glass to be able to look through that body of liquid, to see if it's clear. What degree of clarity it has, whether it's very, very clear and brilliant. Whether it's dull, whether it's hazy and so forth. We're also going to be looking at color and when we have wine in the glass I'll actually show you how to do that. The second phase of tasting uses our nose, our sense of smell. The first thing we're going to do, actually, is swirl the glass and take a quick sniff, just to make sure that the wine is okay. Why would we want to do that? Well, we might want to call for another bottle if there's a problem with that wine. We might want to replace it with a different wine. Basically, what we want to make sure that our fly of wines in front of us are all okay to proceed. So at that point we're going to swirl the wine and sniff it more thoughtfully. And again, I'll show you how to do that soon. And we're going to start to take notes on what we're smelling in the glass. And you noticed that I've given you a whole selection of vocabulary, fruity, floral, vegetal, or vacious, minerally, woody, buttery, and so forth. And we'll delve more into those when we have actually wine in the glass to taste and when we look at particular types of wine. We might want to do this actually two or three different times before even putting any wine in our mouth. Then at some point we're going to take a taste. And we're going to, at first determine the basic taste element center in that glass. By basic taste I mean, sweet, sour, acidity or bitterness. We're going to flip our tongue around and think about the weight or the consistency of the wine. Then we're going to spit and take another sip of that wine, and just little around the mouth maybe pull a little bit of air in and chew it a little bit. And we’re going to determine if there are any aromatics that we're smelling retronasaly while that wine is on our pallet. And we're going to take the appropriate notes, and then we're going to spit the wine out and we're going to think about how long the flavor of the wine sticks around. In other words, what is the length of finish of that wine, how persistent is it. Some wines just jump right off the edge and go away, disappear very quickly. Maybe within a few seconds, less than 30 seconds for sure. Some wines have a medium finish. In other words, they stick for a minute or two. Some wines have a very long finish that may last for several minutes. And several minutes later we still have a full memory of what that wine tasted like on our pallet. At that point, we can wreak and rank the wines. If were tasting the whole flight of wines and we want to put them in order of some parameter. Such as maybe our preference, or age, or relative acidity, or sweetness, or what have you. Some condition by which we're ranking these wines. And then I gave you space on your tasting grade to write down notes later on when the wines are unveiled, you can write down the producer and the varietal where it's from the world, the vintage, the price, and so forth. So let's go ahead and get ready to taste.
