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You pour about a third of the glass's volume into the glass
so that you have enough room to swirl the wine around a little bit.
Standard serving size for wine is 5 ounces.
So if you want to consume wine on a daily base in moderation about a 5 ounce glass
for the ladies and about two 5 ounce glasses for the gentlemen.
We are holding the wine glass by the stem, that's why a wine glass has a stem,
to allow us to hold it in a way that we can swirl the wine in the glass a little bit.
The swirling releases some of the aromas in the wine into the head space of the glass.
The way we describe wines and the way you find wines described is usually by
using other smells that we know, pleasant smells we know from other parts of life.
Fruits, flowers, spices, all those smells come either from
the grape or from the oak barrel that the wine is aged in.
Those oak barrels contribute some of those spicy coconut, vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg kind of notes.
The grape is a very, very complex plant.
It can create a lot of aromas that other plants make themselves as well.
So again, we sometimes see citrus fruit and berries, and apples used as
descriptors for a particular glass of wine.
But that means those identical chemical components are actually made by the grape.
They are in the wine coming from the grape and they are released through the aging process.
So if you smell, again a glass of grape juice it doesn't really smell like very much.
But if you smell the wine a couple years later
you'll be amazed by all the characters that have come out.
The quality of the wine is really all in the nose and that's why we spend a lot of time
evaluating wine by sniffing it and comparing it to pleasant smells that we know from other parts of life.
When we taste the wine, again we evaluate how sweet it is, how tart it is, how astringent it is.
If it gives you the puckery feeling on the tongue like a good red wine should.
If it's a little bitter, if it's a little salty, if it has some savory notes to it.
A little bit of beef broth or soy sauce, some good wines have those kind of characters as well.
And [lips smack] really an excellent choice.
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