How to sample wine like a connoisseur? You need to master these professional vocabulary

Describe acidity
I believe everyone is very familiar with the taste of “sour”. When drinking a wine with high acidity, you can feel a lot of saliva in your mouth, and your cheeks can’t compress on their own. Sauvignon Blanc and Riesling are two well-recognized natural high-acid wines.
Some wines, especially red wines, are so intense that it may be difficult to feel the acidity directly when drinking them. However, as long as you pay attention to whether the inside of the mouth, especially the sides and bottom of the tongue, starts to secrete a lot of saliva after drinking, you can roughly judge its acidity level.
If there is a lot of saliva, it means that the acidity of the wine is really high. In general, white wines have higher acidity than red wines. Some dessert wines can also have high acidity, but the acidity is generally well balanced with the sweetness, so it won’t feel particularly sour when you drink it.

Describe tannins
Tannins bind to proteins in the mouth, which can make the mouth dry and astringent. Acid will add to the bitterness of tannins, so if a wine is not only high in acidity, but also heavy in tannins, it will feel jerky and difficult to drink when it is young.
However, after the wine ages, some of the tannins will become crystals and precipitate as the oxidation progresses; during this process, the tannins themselves will also undergo certain changes, becoming finer, supple, and even possibly Soft as velvet.
At this time, if you taste this wine again, it will become very different from when it was young, the taste will be more round and supple, and there will be no green astringency at all.

Describe the body
Wine body refers to the “weight” and “saturation” that wine brings to the mouth.

If a wine is overall balanced, it means that its flavors, body and various components have reached a state of harmony. Since alcohol can add body to a wine, wines that are too low-alcohol may appear lean; conversely, wines that are high-alcohol tend to be fuller-bodied.
In addition, the higher the concentration of dry extracts (including sugars, non-volatile acids, minerals, phenolics, and glycerol) in the wine, the heavier the wine will be. When the wine is matured in oak barrels, the body of the wine will also increase due to the evaporation of part of the liquid, which increases the concentration of dry extracts.