Red wine, for the most part, is far more interesting in many respects than white wine. Red wine tends to have more intense varietal aromas and flavors and can develop a very complex and subtle bouquet through bottle aging. Whether it is a lighter to medium-bodied Pinot Noir, or a full bodied, astringent Cabernet Sauvignon, both of these wines will go through organoleptic changes that occur during the aging process.

When you’re evaluating the color and clarity of darker red wine it requires you to tilt the glass so that you can look through a thinner layer of wine. Doing this enables you to examine the edge of the wine for haziness and more easily evaluate the intensity or depth of the color in the wine. If it retains its color intensity all the way to the edge of the wine, and the color is very deep, you should expect the other aspects of the wine to also reflect this intensity. If the edge of the wine is colorless, you will find the wine to have less depth of color overall and should not expect it to be intense in odor or flavor.

When making the sensory evaluation you will find that red wines overall have higher alcohol contents than do white wines. What this means to you as the wine taster, is that your olfactory senses will fatigue more rapidly, and you will have to pause a little longer between smelling the wine. In addition, when you take repeated sips of red wine, you will notice that the astringency, or the drying out of the inside of your mouth, gets stronger with each sip of wine. Medical researchers have found that the build up of astringency is less noticeable if tasters wait 40 seconds or longer between sips of red wine.

In regards to red wine aromas and bouquet you will normally encounter berry, dried fruit, vegetative, caramelized, and woody odors. In the early stages (first 10 years) of a red wine’s development, varietal aromas (berry/dried fruit) dominate and bottle-bouquet odors (caramelized/woody) appear gradually (10 – 15 years) with time and will dominate the middle years of the wine’s aging cycle.

The wine, being a living substance, will eventually begin to decrease in quality as off odors, specifically those of oxidation began to appear. The wine can literally die when the “acetaldehyde” off odor of oxidation predominates in the later stages of the wines life. This, of course, all depends on the proper storage of the wine in a stable 55-degree environment away from any direct light, and vibration.

Any way you look at it, a glass of full-bodied red wine will always be more complex and overall more interesting than a glass of white wine.

Happy Tasting!