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Learn about wine-tasting in a Bordeaux chateau

by Anna Goldrein, with photography by Jon Martin

White walls. White desks. Stainless steel sinks for spitting. Spotlights on the wine glasses, a third filled with red wine, placed before each of us students. This was the Bordeaux Wine School's wine-tasting laboratory and we had three days to educate our palates.

Our teacher, Wendy, diagnosed her two glasses of wine expertly: "The left one is more orangey, a slightly older vintage. But the right one is more unctuous, you can see it sticking to the side of the glass. And it has more clarity, don't you think?" I stared at the wines, blankly.

I stuck my nose in the left glass and sniffed, then the right - identical! But for Wendy, they were chalk and cheese: "The left one is blackcurranty. I'm getting boiled fruits, pear drops. The right one is quite different; more masculine, more powerful, blackcurrant with a touch of minty freshness". And that was just the 'first nose'.

Wendy swirled the wine in her two glasses, aerating the wine to release the scents of the heady, more revelatory 'second nose'. I followed suit, spilling red wine down my front in the process. As our teacher waxed lyrical, we made notes in our degustation (tasting) books, from appearance to taste, vintage, chateau, Bordeaux location (left bank, right bank or Entre-Deux-Mers), period of maturation in (new or nearly new) oak barrels, soil, subsoil, sunshine and grape varieties. We may as well have been reading our future in tea leaves. Not one of us could pinpoint a single smell with any degree of accuracy.

Time to go back to basics. Glasses of clear liquid were brought to us. Delicacy went out the window as we spat out vinegar (tasted at the sides of the tongue), bitter (back of the throat), sugar (tongue tip) and tannin (sensed inside the lips and cheeks). Then, little pots of scent (each numbered) were passed around. But without any visual clues, it was hard to decipher even the most familiar of smells - I mistook coffee for caramel, apricot for walnut, grass for aniseed and gone-off onions for bad eggs. The main thing was to organise aromas into neat, mental boxes - animal (leather, cat's pee?), vegetal (hay, grass?), fruity (pear, pineapple?), floral (violet, honeysuckle?), balsamic (resin, pine), woody (oak, tobacco), chemical (sulphur, glue?), spices (vanilla, liquorice?), burnt (toast, roasted coffee?), ethereal (yeast, furniture polish?) and mineral (flint, wet stone!). With this new armour of wine vocabulary, method and concentration, the class set to work.

And hard work it was. Over three days of taking notes and concentration, we tasted over thirty wines in the laboratory and Bordeaux chateaux Faugeres and Haut-Sarpe. I got to know some of my fellow students: a Spanish couple who had just inherited a 200 hectare vineyard and needed to learn fast, a wine-importer from Korea, a Brazilian ex-lawyer looking forward to wine-tasting stardom on her return and me, counting the minutes before I could devour the contents of my father's wine cellar.

Gradually, the scents started to make sense. Wendy poured out the wines. We knew exactly what to do. Examine their subtle tones by tipping the glasses to 45%. Decipher the first nose. "Vanilla", someone volunteered. "Green pepper", said another. "Oak", I exclaimed, triumphant. I swilled the glass, spilling just a few splashes. The second nose - a powerful whiff wafted from my wine glass as I pulled apart its myriad scents like the spectrum of a rainbow. I was not a wine expert (as our blind tasting - the grand finale of the course - revealed) but I had learned how to learn. From now on, with my Bordeaux Wine Tasting Certificate hanging proudly on my wall, my educated nose would always be at the ready to sniff out a good wine.

Contact Details

The Bordeaux Wine School offers beginners and intermediary wine courses in English.
Beginners courses (Mon, Tue and Wed)
Intermediary (Thu, Fri and Sat).
Courses run between 10 June - 20 September.
Aug 13-15 (beginners)
Sep 23-25 (beginners)
Sep 26-28 (intermediary)
Courses in French are also available.

Bordeaux Wine School
1, cours du 30 Juillet
33075 Bordeaux, France
Tel: + (33) 5 56 00 22 66
Fax: + (33) 5 56 00 22 82
Email: ecole@vins-bordeaux.fr
www.ecole.vins-bordeaux.fr

Cost: Prices vary, but prices include wine course and tastings, the two first lunchtime meals (restaurant and chateau) and chateau visits. Accommodation is not included but the CIVB can provide a list of hotels.

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