Love enters through the eyes

To follow the rules, I need to say that last time we were talking about the nose aromatic experience because it was related to my first approach to wine. However, I must say that the first conversation with our wine starts with our eyes. As the saying goes, love enters through the eyes

Yes, just as if we are talking to our friends, family, etc., looking in the eye is important. My grandmother used to say something she heard someday: “eyes are our soul’s mirror”. We can find out if someone is in love, angry, happy, sad, if they are telling the truth about something, etc., through their eyes.

So, as with friends, with our glass of wine we must start by looking. As it has no eyes, we must see the color, the body with viscosity and density, the clear or hazy appearance of a wine defines whether there are visible particles.

Related: How I Met Wine

The best way to see our friend is against a white background through our transparent glass. First the color and then the edging. With our eyes we cannot know yet a lot of what this wine will tell us, but it will give us a hint of our wines age, whether it is clean and bright (without particles). If it has no brightness, it might be a low-acidity wine, so this is a very important thing if we are talking about a white or a rosé, which must have a higher acidity level.

About our wine body, it means that some wines could be more fluid than others. Barrel fermentation produces more glycerol, so the wine’s texture is thicker. We can find out by swirling our glass so that it shows our wine’s legs, which are the streams of liquid that adhere to the side of our glass and run down. It is an indicator of the alcoholic content.

A red wine that shows low chromatic intensity is telling you that is a young one, or it could be a sign that it was produced at a cold weather region. If the color is darker, we might be talking with a mature wine. It might possess some maceration or aging process and be produced at a warm weather region.

The same process occurs with a white wine. If it is pale, it should be a young wine. But if it has been subjected to aging in wooden barrels the color will be darker.

Our experience today should be observing our wine, noticing what is it telling us. It is our first contact with it…. Let’s do it!  Start this conversation through eye contact, then our noses will start to receive more information. At this point we should be expecting which kind of talk we will have with it.

This first approach will show us some aspects of who are we meeting. But then time passes and the conversation begins to be more profound. Actually, it could get more and more interesting. Just as in life, let’s give ourselves the opportunity to meet new friends with different ways of thinking. Let’s keep learning from each other. So it is with wines: different regions, weathers, elaboration methods. It could become your favorite one, or it could be just an experience. Remember that this glass of wine contains dreams, time, and hard work to be as it is, just like everyone of us.