3-steps tasting

Tasting Loire wines calls on your senses, especially sight, smell and taste. 

Looking at the wine's color, smelling its bouquet and then tasting it, these are the 3 steps of wine tasting!

Step #1: look
Step #2: smell
Step #3: taste

With your glass of Loire Valley wine on the table, you can assess the wine's color:

Exact color:

• Loire Valley white wines can be dry and semi-dry, mellow or even syrupy. They come in a wide range of yellows: green, lemon, straw, golden or amber.
• Rosé Loire wines come in many shades of pink: gray, peony, salmon pink, raspberry, cherry, orange.
• Red Loire wines vary in hue according to grape variety and vinification. They can be purplish red, cherry, ruby, garnet, purple, brown, black or even
  oiled.

Intensity: light or pale, light, medium, sustained, dark, dense, deep.
Brightness:vivid, frank, shiny, brilliant, dull, matte, oxidized, worn, faded.
Limpidity:cloudy, louche, hazy, veiled, clear, bright, crystalline, with or without deposit.
Fluidity:fluid, thick, dense, oily, viscous.

The nose, an indispensable organ of taste! 

Plunge your nose into your glass of Loire wine, sniff, inhale, take a breath and try again. You'll perceive subtle, powerful, fresh, pleasant scents... or unpleasant ones if the cork has played a nasty trick on the wine.

All these aromas may evoke in you a scent of flowers, a fruit dessert , a baked brioche, your grandfather's tobacco joke, the spices of a previous dinner, a mushroom gathering and many more that you'll spontaneously associate with your memories, places, people, emotions.

You'll be able to find aromatic nuances:

• flowers (white, rose, violet, acacia, elder, lime)
• fresh fruit (apricot, citrus, banana, red fruit)
• dried fruit (walnut, hazelnut)
• confit fruit (fig, orange peel)
• vegetal (grass, fern, hay)
• undergrowth (mushroom, earth, humus)
• animals (meat, leather, amber)
• empyreumatic (toast, coffee, burnt wood, earth, sulfur, tobacco)
• balsamic (vanilla, thyme, pine resin)
• wood (casks, green wood)
• spices (cinnamon, clove, pepper, honey)
• minerals (flint, flint, iodine).

Then it's time to taste the wine!

From a quickly gulped Loire wine you will have seen nothing, smelled nothing, retained nothing. 

What could be more pleasurable than pouring yourself a glass of wine and enjoying every sip? Is your wine gourmand like a cabernet-d'anjou or a coteaux-du-layon, vivid and fresh like a muscadet, supple like a saumur-champigny, elegant and refined like a savennières or anjou-blanc, light and fruity like a touraine, sparkling like a crémant-de-loire or saumur-brut, round like a chinon? It's by rolling the wine around in your mouth, chewing it with your tongue according to custom and making an effort to pay attention that you'll be able to enjoy it to the full.

Once the wine has been swallowed, or spat out, just a little more attention: you'll be able to tell whether the wine is long on the palate or short, i.e. whether its flavors and aromas fade quickly or bloom for a long time.
Even with very little experience, you'll be able to evoke what odorous notes are expressed between the back of the throat and the nose, what the nature of the tannins is: whether they're soft on the palate, silky and supple, and whether your sensation is pleasant. 

Comparing the odor and aroma of the same wine makes tasting richer and more interesting: you'll come to better grasp all the facets of the product.