The Tasting Box Selection
With this tasting box, we wanted to pay tribute to the country whose wines are the envy of the world: France!
So we selected three wines that showcase the diversity of its terroirs, with very different colours, climates and flavour profiles. Cheers!
The Tasting
Pro tip: There’s an ideal order for tasting wines. Start with sparkling wines, then move on to whites and rosés, followed by reds, and finish with sweet wines. The idea is to build up the intensity to excite your taste buds without overwhelming them.
The wines are presented in the ideal tasting order.
Preparing for the tasting
• Our tasting boxes are designed to give you the best possible tasting experience. It’s up to you whether you taste all the wines in the box at once or spread the experience over several evenings!
• Our vial size is chosen to allow two people to taste the wines.
• Bear in mind that the wines should not all be served at the same temperature. Please check the ideal serving temperature in the booklet included with the box or in the wine profiles below.
A good glass makes a real difference to how you experience a wine. Its shape affects how aromas are concentrated towards your nose at the top of the glass, how much the wine is aerated through contact with the air, and even the wine’s temperature through its contact with the glass.
To start with, we recommend using "INAO" glasses, whose shape has been scientifically designed for optimal tasting of all types of wine.
Otherwise, any "tulip-shaped" glass will work well, allowing the aromas to develop in the glass and concentrate towards your nose.
A packet of plain, unsalted crackers will do the job perfectly when it comes to cleansing your palate between wines. The flour they contain helps absorb the flavour of the previous wine, refreshing your taste buds without leaving a new taste in your mouth.
Alternatively, any neutral-tasting food will work well: bread, pretzels and, above all, water! This helps prevent "palate fatigue", which occurs when too many flavours build up at once.
The steps of wine tasting
• Clues to the wine’s age
Tilt the glass against a white background to distinguish a young wine from an older one.
• Clues to the alcohol and glycerol content, and the residual sugar level
Keep the glass slightly tilted and swirl it gently to watch droplets form and run down the inside. These are the wine’s tears, or legs.
• The first nose
Tilt the glass to 45° and bring it close to your nose without swirling it to detect the first aromas.
This stage is particularly useful for detecting wine faults: cork taint, a vinegary smell, oxidation or reduction.
• The second nose
Swirl the wine in the glass for a few seconds to aerate it and release its secondary aromas.
This should bring out other, less volatile aromas.
Take a small sip of wine and swirl it around your mouth with your tongue so it reaches every part of your mouth and you can appreciate all its flavours.
The ultimate technique is retronasal olfaction: draw a little air in through your mouth while keeping the wine in it, then breathe out through your nose.
You can then swallow the wine or spit it into a small container provided for the purpose.
The Connoisseurs’ Corner
Radioactivity can help determine a wine’s age
To detect counterfeits, it is possible to determine a wine’s harvest year by measuring its radioactivity. If it is old enough, the vines used will have absorbed minute traces linked to the first nuclear tests and the Chernobyl disaster.