Quality wines

It is not easy to pick some good quality Italian wines to enjoy a nice evening with your friends or loved ones. Luckily, Italy offers so many different options for a good red or white wine, sweet or tangier, and with countless pairings possible to organize, to make your food taste even more delicious. However, before learning how to drink red wine, it is essential to learn how to recognize a good quality wine and its main characteristics, from a more common one. Of course, the taste must be exceptional, but what other things you must look for, in a good wine?

Quality wines: 4 factors to consider

As it has been mentioned before, there are many different traits that you should analyze in a wine, to determine its greatness. Despite all of this, the main four characteristics to understand are the following ones: the smell, the balance, the depth and the finish. Once you have started to recognize, master the proper knowledge about these types and exercised a lot on them, you will be able to converse casually about quality wines and recognize a good one, whenever you will stumble upon it.

Smell

The first and one of the most important characteristics that you should notice, whenever you open a bottle of fine wine, is of course its smell. In fact, the smell is the focal and most prominent feature of a good wine, and even from a small sniff, you could understand what kind of wine you have in front of you. Usually, indicators of a good wine are considered very fruity or flowery smells, that can persist on your nose, without seeming too harsh, such as for wines like Amarone.

Balance

Another very important element that wine connoisseurs must know and recognize, whenever they try to judge the quality of a wine, is the balance. But, what does it mean? In this sector, balance indicates a good equity or (in other cases) a good mix of different components in the wine, in order to create a good taste. The five elements that need to be balanced are the acidity, tannins, sugar/sweetness, alcohol and fruit, so that the wine could offer a great experience on your palate. A great example of balance might be the Recioto della Valpolicella Classico, that can balance out perfectly fruity and floral notes with a persistent spirit. They also should not smell too woody, because it could indicate that they have been aged for too much time in barrels.

Depth

This step is very important to the understanding of a good quality wine, because it describes how various and complex the taste is. For example, how many different notes of taste can be felt, while tasting the wine, and how strong they are. The depth of a wine can actually make its quality increase very quickly, so you should really be careful to it.

Finish

One vital indicator for wine quality that, unfortunately doesn’t get noticed as much as the others, is the intensity or the finish. These terms tend to indicate the lingering sensation that the wine will leave on your palate and how long or persistent will it stays, even after you have drunk it. As it may seem obvious, the finish aftertaste and its intensity are strictly connected: if your wine’s flavor will quickly disappear, after you have swallowed your sip, the wine will not be of the best quality. Instead, the longer the aftertaste will last on your tongue, the higher will be the quality of the wine.

Wine quality: Typicity and Complexity

Despite all of these, there are many other characteristics that could help you to understand the quality of a good wine, such as the typicity and the complexity. The first concept is used to describe the different components that could be present in a wine and how rich the flavor can become, because of them. Therefore, a good quality wine must have a complex aftertaste, with balanced elements that combine well together. Instead, typicity is considered the expected taste and look, that we think a wine should have and, of course, the more similar to our expectations a wine tastes, the higher the quality will be.