The influence of the moon and the star constellations on how a wine tastes on a particular day has already been discussed in Moody burgundy and other (fairy?) stories and on the forum ; and in...

This was the scene at last week's Wines of Chile annual generic tasting. In London we're in peak season for generic tastings, with Argentina this week and South Africa early next month....

Here's a brilliant idea: a table that converts easily from a dining table to a wine tasting bench. We professional tasters know well how literally back-breaking it is to write tasting...

You may (or may well not) wonder about the mechanics of our going to an external tasting and getting the tasting notes on to this site as efficiently as possible. More and more we take...

See also Those wine faults in full . Along with about 30 others, I spent all of yesterday cloistered in an upper room at Australia House in London being taught how to taste wine. The...

State-of-mind is a complex affair. Unfortunately, my formal knowledge of psychology goes no further than that somewhat bland brushstroke of a statement. I took English Literature instead. Yet for...

Tamlyn Currin started doing wine classes with Michael Schmidt about five years ago, and then went down the more conventional route by doing the WSET Intermediate and Advanced in...

As a result of my article on tasting and anosmia Take one nose at the weekend I have had quite a bit of correspondence. Several tasters and wine lovers, some quite well known, confess to...

For me the sweetest smell in recent memory is that of cheese straws through floorboards. I was in the basement of a house in Islington, North London, one of a dozen tasters rating anonymous...

For those trying to find decent wine cellar software to use to keep track of their wine purchases and/or tasting notes, fellow purple pagers suggest the following: use one of the...

Several purple pagers have asked me in advance of going to a tasting involving particularly young wine what they should look out for and here are my suggestions. Tasting young red wine...

All you need to be a wine taster is a glass and a moment's attention. A lot of unnecessary fuss is made about extraneous smells (taking that argument to its logical conclusion we'd never serve...

As far as I'm concerned, the enjoyment of wine has to begin with the glass in your hand. Swotting up wine geography and vintage ratings is an optional extra and comes a long way down the...

Here's a categorisation of some of the tasting terms I use most commonly for smells and flavours (you may have noticed that I have a somewhat limited wine vocabulary). I've put them into groups...

The following alphabetical list is a guide to the words most commonly used by us professionals (often with a blithe lack of precision) in connection with both tastings and the dimensions of wine....