Wine Tasting for Beginners

Geared toward begin­ners, this series of videos cre­at­ed by Wine Library TV offers an intro­duc­tion to the basics of wine tast­ing. In these nine videos, you’ll learn how to taste wine and train your palate, why the tem­per­a­ture of wine mat­ters, how wine glass­es can affect the taste of wine, and how to decant it. Plus, you will learn some­thing about the dif­fer­ence between “new world” and “old world” wines and a lit­tle about wine rat­ings too. The host has his own unique style. It’s a lit­tle Jim Cramer-esque, to my mind. But if it works for you, the videos can help you move from sim­ply drink­ing wine to tast­ing it with a lit­tle insight and per­spec­tive.

While on this sub­ject, we should refer you back to an item men­tioned in one of our more pop­u­lar pieces, 10 Unex­pect­ed Uses of the iPod. Here, we men­tioned that you can use your MP3 play­er to take a series of wine tast­ing cours­es (“Enjoy­ing Wine,” “Select­ing Wine,” and “Wine Regions”). Each costs $35. You can down­load a free demo from the ven­dor’s home­page and see if it works for you.

But if you pre­fer some good free resources, head over to Vinog­ra­phy. This big wine blog fea­tures on the left-hand nav­i­ga­tion bar (scroll down a lit­tle) a long list of free wine pod­casts and spe­cial­ized blogs. While you’re there, you may par­tic­u­lar­ly want to check out their wine aro­ma card, which is hand­i­ly pub­lished in Eng­lish, Span­ish and Ital­ian. An impres­sive site, to be sure.