How to easily recognise a good wine

Eva Pizarro

Sommelier at Fierro restaurant and trainer at Tandem Gastronómico.

We delve into one of the most complex aspects of the wine world, a topic that generates numerous publications, lists, rankings, points and press headlines.

Indeed, wine exists in a duality that, if not properly understood, sparks the eternal debate: Why is this wine considered good?

This duality is based on two aspects:

taste and quality.

• Taste is a subjective aspect dependent on what our senses find pleasurable, and this introduces individual differences: what may be a cloying sweetness to one person could be delightful to another. My tolerance for acidity may lead me to love wines with high levels of it, while for others, these wines might be unpleasant. Therefore, the taste is subjective and will depend on each person, on the moment in which the wine is consumed, with whom it’s consumed, its price, etc.
• Quality is objective it must be based on objective, measurable parameters, without a measurement method it’s impossible to establish a rating. The most commonly used tool is tasting, which involves using tasting sheets to measure various parameters, allowing us to reach a conclusion about the wine and thus establish its quality.

Let’s delve into this and see which aspects can help us determine a wine's quality:

• A basic aspect is that the wine should be free of defects: it should not have a colour inconsistent with its age, nor should it have unpleasant odours or flavours resulting from poor production or storage.
• One of the elements that most influences the quality of wine is the main ingredients with which it’s made: the grape and where it’s planted. It will determine the richness of aromas; the greater the variety, the higher the regard the wine will receive.
• The complexity is also key, and this often comes from the wine's ageing process, which modifies and evolves these aromas into more complex ones. This is another key factor in assessing the quality of wines: whether their evolution over time enhances them.
• Balance: it’s a difficult aspect to measure based solely on taste, but in terms of tasting, it should show harmony among the various parameters of acidity, tannin, alcohol and sweetness. It is often mistakenly thought that a good wine must be full-bodied, robust and powerful. However, the delicacy of aromas and a subtle, yet long-lasting finish can be the foundation of a truly exceptional wine.
• Precisely, a wine’s length is a hallmark of quality: it means that the wine lingers on the palate, rather than disappearing quickly. Its flavours and aromas should persist and remain deeply felt in our senses for an extended period.
   

The parameters we’ve described are easily quantifiable with experience in tasting, but this requires hours of training and sampling many wines to establish a scale of values and thus quantify them effectively. However, other aspects are more challenging to measure. These require studying and understanding the wine's history, its region, and the potential of a specific vineyard or plot. These are the aspects that give a wine an added dimension: whether it represents its region, if it is the best expression of a particular grape variety, if it opens up new possibilities for a region, if it displays its typicity if it aligns with expected characteristics, if it has potential for improvement, and if it maintains consistent quality.

As you can see, determining the quality of a wine can range from quite straightforward to extremely complex, depending on the approach we take. However, the best wine will always be the one that we personally enjoy the most at any given moment.

As I like to think, wine is a never-ending journey. With each step, we uncover new wines that thrill us, while others may fade into the background. It’s all about learning and evolving along the way.