There’s a time and a place for this and I’m sure there are few things we’d all move away from faster than a gargling wine bore who’s ‘at it’ all the way down the bottle.  It’s properly dull.

But it’s an essential part of really tasting wine, getting it around every part of our mouth.  In fact, to properly evaluate this magical juice we have to see it, smell it and taste it and actually think about it at each stage.  We’ll get a different clue as to what we’ve got in the glass with each step.

Why bother though and what are we looking for?  We do it because wine, when it’s been made well, is a complex drink with the power to captivate the minds of wine nuts above any other liquid luxury.  So we want to enjoy it to it’s max.

… and it all starts with ‘see’.  It’s the first time we’ll get a hint of depth, age, grape variety and whether the wine is in good ‘nick’.  Look for a haziness that could mean a fault; look how deep the colour is in your white to tell signs of age or oak, and for reds, the depth of colour will rule out some grape varieties and again give tell-tale signs of age.  A grape variety with a thin skin, Pinot Noir for example will rarely, if ever, give a deep coloured red wine.  Shiraz on the other hand has a thick skin that will hold a lot of pigment and so can produce a deep, dark red.  There are so many clues we can get from just looking at it.

Then to the smell, we’re getting close to the fun part.  Is it musty?  Does it have a hint of wet cardboard - it’s probably corked, or is it clean with vibrant fresh fruit, so, probably a youthful wine.  The smell could/should confirm what we were thinking from the look, but give us even more.

And now, to the to the fun part, the taste which should make the look and the smell make sense – let’s get gargling.  Our tongues have many parts, all with different sensitivities to flavour.  We’re looking for sweet, sour, salty, bitter and savoury tastes, all of which we’ll find to a greater or lesser extent in wine.  The sides and the front of our tongues are most receptive.  We’ll get acidity on the sides and sweetness on the front, and at the back we’ll get bitterness then, over the top of the tongue, when we roll the wine around (and try not to leak it out the side of our mouth), we’ll get all the other flavours.  Try it, but not wearing white.

And why don’t we do this with beer, cider and other drinks.  Well maybe we do, but the humble grape has the real magic.  It’s the only fruit that ceases to smell or taste of what it was before we fermented it – and that’s the start of the complexities.  Taste a cider, it’ll taste of apples; a rhubarb wine will taste of rhubarb but a Sauvignon Blanc smells and tastes of anything from cut grass to gooseberries, cats pee, mangos, passion fruit and elderflower – and it's made of grapes, it’s nuts!

But, hang on, do we spit or swallow?  It really depends how much you’ve got to taste of course but beware, even when we spit, we end up absorbing a fair wack of alcohol.  To taste wine(s) seriously you spit, then, once you’ve done all the thinking and maybe writing, you take a good gulp and swallow, and then, you’ll have the real picture.