How to Taste Wine: The Five Steps We Use in Our Own Cellar

Updated July 2026 · Boschkloof Wines team · 9 min read

Almost every week, someone sits down at our tasting table and says a version of the same sentence. “I don’t really know anything about wine.” It is usually said with a small apologetic laugh, before a single glass has been poured.

We would like to gently retire that sentence. Learning how to taste wine is not a test, and nobody at a cellar door is quietly marking you. It is a set of five small habits that slow you down and give your senses something to do.

Below are the exact steps we use ourselves on Polkadraai Road, when we are checking a barrel or deciding what goes into a blend. They work just as well at a kitchen table on a Tuesday evening. By the end you will know the five steps, what to notice in each one, and how to walk into any tasting room feeling completely at ease.

TL;DR

• The five steps of wine tasting are look, swirl, smell, taste, and finish. Working through them in order is what turns drinking into tasting.
• Swirling releases the wine’s aromatic compounds into the air above the glass, which is why the smell gets stronger after you swirl.
• Most of what we call flavour is actually smell, so the smelling step deserves more time than people usually give it.
• Spitting at a tasting is completely normal and expected. It is not rude, and it lets you taste attentively across several wines.
• Serve reds at 16 to 18°C and whites at 7 to 13°C. Wine served too cold tastes muted, because low temperatures suppress its aromatics.

Before you pour: a bit of simple setup

You do not need special equipment, but a few small things make a noticeable difference to what you can detect.

Use a glass with a bowl and a stem. The bowl gathers the aromatics, and the stem keeps your hand off the bowl so you are not warming the wine. A single all-purpose glass is genuinely fine. Fill it about a third full so there is room to swirl.

Get the temperature right. Reds are best around 16 to 18°C, which on a warm Cape afternoon means twenty minutes in the fridge first. Whites sit between 7 and 13°C, with lighter, crisper styles at the cooler end and richer, oaked whites at the warmer end.

Do not over-chill. Cold suppresses aroma, so a wine straight from the back of the fridge tastes of almost nothing except acidity and chill. If a white seems closed and dull, cup the bowl in your hands for a minute and taste it again as it warms.

Two last things: taste in daylight if you can, since colour is hard to read under warm indoor lighting, and skip the perfume or aftershave, because your nose is doing the heavy lifting. If you are tasting several wines, work from light to full and dry to sweet, so a big red does not flatten a delicate white that follows it.

The five steps of wine tasting

Here is the sequence. It takes about a minute per wine once it becomes second nature, and you can do the whole thing without saying a word out loud.

1. Look

Tilt the glass slightly away from you against something white. A napkin, a tablecloth, or a sheet of paper all work.

You are reading two things: colour and intensity. Reds move from purple in their youth, through ruby and garnet, towards brick and tawny with age. Whites go the other way, deepening from pale straw and green-tinged in youth towards gold and amber as they age.

Intensity hints at the grape. A deep, opaque red suggests a thick-skinned variety such as Syrah or Cabernet Sauvignon, while a pale, translucent one points towards something like Pinot Noir. This is not a party trick you need to master. It is simply the first piece of information the wine offers, and it costs you three seconds.

2. Swirl

Swirling looks like the most self-conscious part of the whole thing, so let us be clear about why it actually matters.

Wine is full of aromatic compounds that only reach your nose once they leave the liquid. Swirling spreads the wine across the inside of the bowl and pushes those compounds into the air above the glass. That is the entire mechanism. Smell a still glass, swirl it for five seconds, then smell it again and the difference is obvious.

If you are nervous about it, keep the base of the glass flat on the table and move it in small circles. That is how most people in the trade do it, including us.

3. Smell

This is the biggest step, because most of what we call taste is really smell. Your tongue registers a handful of basic sensations. Your nose does the rest.

Take short sniffs rather than one long inhale. Two or three quick ones give your nose a fresh reading each time, whereas a single long draw tires it out. Come back again after ten seconds, because young wines open up quickly.

Work from broad families towards specifics:

• Fruit: citrus, stone fruit, tropical, red berry, black berry, dried fruit
• Floral: blossom, rose, violet, fynbos
• Spice: black pepper, clove, cinnamon, liquorice
• Earth and savoury: stone, soil, mushroom, leather, cured meat
• Oak and ageing: vanilla, cedar, smoke, toast, coffee

Start with “is this fruity or savoury?” then narrow down. If the closest you get is “smells like a boiled sweet,” that is a real and useful note, and honestly a better one than most.

There is no wrong answer here. Aroma is tied to memory, and your memories are not the same as ours.

4. Taste

Take a small sip, not a mouthful, and let it move across your whole mouth before you swallow or spit. Coating the whole mouth gives the wine more contact and lets it warm slightly, which releases more aroma, so you simply get more from it than you would from a quick swallow.

Five things are worth paying attention to:

• Sweetness: does it taste sweet, or just ripe? Most reds are dry even when the fruit is generous. We cover this properly in our guide to dry red wine
• Acidity: the tartness that makes your mouth water. High acidity feels fresh and lively, low acidity feels soft and round
• Tannin: the drying, grippy sensation on your gums and the sides of your tongue, found in reds. Think of over-steeped tea
• Body: how heavy the wine feels. The old comparison is skim milk against cream, and it still works
• Alcohol: a warmth at the back of the throat. Noticeable warmth without matching flavour usually means the wine is out of balance

Then, last, the actual flavours. Most of them will echo what you smelled, which is a good sign that you were smelling accurately.

5. Finish

Swallow or spit, then simply wait and count. The finish is how long the flavour stays with you afterwards, and whether it changes while it lingers.

A short finish disappears almost immediately. A long one holds for fifteen, twenty, thirty seconds and often develops as it goes, with fruit giving way to spice, savoury notes, or a mineral edge. Length is one of the clearest markers of quality, and it needs no vocabulary at all. You are just counting.

This is the step people skip most often, and the one that tells you most about whether a wine is genuinely good or merely pleasant.

Tasting-room etiquette, minus the anxiety

Most of the worry people carry into a cellar door is about behaviour rather than wine. So here is what actually happens at a tasting.

Spitting is normal and expected. There is a spittoon on the counter for exactly this reason, and it is not rude to use it. Tasting is about attention rather than quantity, and almost everyone who does this professionally spits. If you are driving, or simply want your palate working as well at the end of a tasting as it did at the start, it is the sensible choice.

You are allowed to dislike something. “Not for me” is a complete sentence and a genuinely useful one. It tells the host what to pour you next, and it is far more helpful than polite agreement.

You do not have to buy anything. A tasting stands on its own. Nobody is keeping score at the counter.

You do not need fancy words. “It smells like blackcurrant jam” beats a memorised phrase every time. Describing what you notice in ordinary language is the whole skill.

Ask questions. This is the part people underuse. Ask about the soil, the vintage, why one wine saw oak and another did not, what the harvest was like. The people pouring have usually spent months on that wine and would far rather talk about it than watch you nod silently.

And if you are not drinking at all, whether for health, religion, pregnancy, or simply because you would rather not, you are welcome at the table. Looking, swirling and smelling give you most of the experience, and a tasting room is a good place to spend an hour regardless of what you put in the glass.

You are not missing a secret

Here is the thing nobody says often enough. Tasting notes are associations, not facts.

When a note says “cassis and graphite,” nobody put cassis or graphite in the bottle. A taster smelled the wine, reached for the closest memory they had, and wrote it down. Your memories are different, so your notes will be different, and neither of you is wrong.

You are also allowed to disagree with the tasting sheet in front of you. If the card says violets and you get plum, you got plum. Trained tasters disagree with each other constantly, and quite loudly. The formal frameworks used by bodies like the Wine & Spirit Education Trust exist to give people a shared language, not to hand out right answers.

The only genuine mistake is not paying attention.

How to build a palate over time

Palate is memory. It builds slowly and it builds through comparison, which means a few habits are worth more than any amount of reading.

Taste two wines side by side. Two contrasting wines together teach you more than one expensive bottle alone. Put a crisp Sauvignon Blanc next to a fuller Chardonnay, or a light red next to a full-bodied one, and the differences become obvious in a way they never are in isolation. Our guide to what Chenin Blanc tastes like makes a good starting point for a comparison like that.

Keep simple notes. Three lines on your phone is plenty. Wine, date, what you noticed, whether you would buy it again.

Revisit the same wine across vintages. The same block of vines, the same hands in the cellar, a different season. That comparison teaches you what a site tastes like and what a year does to it, which is most of what winemaking is about.

Taste with food. Wine changes shape against a plate, sometimes completely. Our beginner’s guide to wine pairing covers the local logic of it.

Frequently asked questions about tasting wine

Come and practise the five steps with us

Learning how to taste wine takes one afternoon of paying attention and then a lifetime of quietly getting better at it. Nobody arrives knowing everything, including the people pouring, and the whole thing is far friendlier than its reputation suggests.

Come and try it with us on Polkadraai Road. Our tasting room is open Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, and closed on weekends and public holidays. Book an unhurried tasting at our cellar and spend a lazy afternoon working through the five steps with someone who made the wine. Real people. Real wine. Real rewards.

Prefer to start at home? Explore our Stellenbosch Syrah, from our family cellar to your table. We ship within South Africa only.