Wine 101: Color

Wednesdays on the BottleBlog will feature an education session on wine, beer or spirits. Today Shannon Spare shares her experiences as a beginner in the World of Wine.

Welcome to Workshop Wednesdays! My name is Shannon, and I was brought on by Joe Canal's to manage our web content. When I was offered the job, I was told that I would "have to drink a lot more wine," which was, to be honest, just fine with me! While I've drunk wine, and liked wine, for many years now, I don't really know wine, and I've always wanted to. I still consider myself a novice. (I'm the "Average Joe" at Joe Canal's, if you will.) I thought it would be a cool idea to blog about my experience learning the ropes of the wine world, since so many of our customers are just like me in the sense that we love wine, but don't really know it.

I've been to a few wine festivals and tastings before, in my past life, and it was always a lot of fun bringing my little glass to all the tables to drink lots and lots of wine. I never really paid attention to what I was drinking, other than "Okay, this one tastes good," or "Ew, that's gross, give me more of that blackberry one to wash the taste away." I only remember one wine clearly, because it tasted like chocolate. No, seriously. The wine tasted LIKE CHOCOLATE. It was a Cabernet Sauvignon, I bought three bottles of it, and they were gone within a month. The next year we went back to the same festival and tasted the new vintage of the same wine, and it didn't taste as much like chocolate anymore - it tasted like wine. Disappointment aside, that was the first (and last) time that a wine really tasted like anything to me, and it was my first exposure to the subtle (and not so subtle) changes in different vintages of wines. It also made me realize that there's a lot more to this wine stuff than "this is delicious," and peaked my interest to learn more, so I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to do so now (and get paid for it)!

One of my first days here, there was a staff tasting spread out in our Liquid Learning Center to sample some new wines we would be bringing in to the store. She poured me a glass and I asked, "So... what do I do now?" And she performed this ritual that I, quite honestly, felt pretty stupid and uncoordinated duplicating, especially considering the red wine I had dripping down my chin.

Although I still couldn't pick much flavor out of the wines other than "This tastes good to me," or "This tastes bad to me," I did learn about some important wine qualities to consider when tasting, and they didn't really have to do with tasting at all.

The first thing I learned to look at is the color of the wine.

Red wines can range from a light brick red to a deep maroon-purple color, and everything in between. In general, the darker or brighter the color of the wine is, the younger it is. The subtle color changes can be noticed more on the edge of the wine in the glass, and darken in the middle. Very aged wines can even have a brownish tinge to them.

With whites, the opposite is true. Young wines start as what wine folks call "water-white," and move through a spectrum of pale yellows, straw, and finally settling into a warm golden color when they are fully mature.

Since my first "official" tasting, I've been noticing subtle color differences in the wines that I've been drinking. Interesting stuff!

Until next time, I'd love to hear your experiences with the wine color spectrum, and if you have any more information for me to soak up! Just leave a comment!