1. The First Glass

Welcome to the first lesson. This course takes you from your very first glass of wine to a confident understanding of why one wine differs from another. It starts with tasting, because every later lesson gets checked in the glass. From there it moves out to the vineyard and into the winery, then on to special styles like sparkling and sweet wines, the major grapes, and how labels and wine law work. After that come storing and serving wine and pairing it with food, then a long tour of the world's wine regions, and finally buying wine with some judgment. Along the way, one place serves as home ground: the Willamette Valley in Oregon. Each lesson lands on what its idea looks like there, so the valley's places and grapes become your working reference for everything else.

Picture a glass of wine on a table in front of you. It might be pale yellow, or it might be dark red, almost black in the middle. Before you take a sip, that glass is already telling you something about the grapes, about what the winemaker did with them, and sometimes about how old the wine is. This first lesson is about learning to read it.

It comes in two parts. The first is what wine actually is, and the main kinds of wine you will meet on a shelf. The second is the hands-on part: how to look at a glass of wine and how to smell it, slowly, one step at a time. You do not need to know a single wine word to start, and you do not need to drink anything either. If you want to follow along with a glass, you can, and if you would rather just listen, every step still works.

What is in the glass

Wine starts as grape juice. Crush a ripe grape and you get sweet juice, because ripe grapes are full of sugar. Then yeast gets involved. Yeast is a tiny living thing, a kind of fungus, the same sort of organism that makes bread rise, and it eats sugar. When it eats the sugar in grape juice, it gives off two things: alcohol, and carbon dioxide, which is the gas in soda bubbles. That process is called fermentation.

So the simplest definition is this: wine is grape juice that yeast has fermented, turning its sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide.

Usually the carbon dioxide just floats away into the air while the wine ferments, and the alcohol stays. If the yeast eats all the sugar, the wine ends up dry, which in wine talk means not sweet. If some sugar is left over, the wine tastes sweet.

That one process gives you every wine in the world, and the differences come from choices. Which grapes were used? Were the skins left in the juice or taken out? Was the gas let out or trapped, was the fermentation stopped early, and was anything added? Each big family of wine comes from one of those choices, and once you know the choice, you can picture the wine.

Start with color, because it surprises a lot of people. Almost all grape juice is clear or pale, even from dark purple grapes. Squeeze a red grape and the juice that runs out is close to colorless, because the color lives in the skin. So the color of a wine depends mostly on how long the juice spends with the skins.

White wine is made by keeping juice and skins apart. The grapes are crushed and pressed right away, before fermentation, so the juice runs off on its own and picks up very little color. It also picks up very little tannin. Tannin is a substance in grape skins and seeds that makes your mouth feel dry and a little rough, the way strong black tea does, and white wine has almost none because the skins were removed so early. White wine is usually made from green or yellow grapes, though the method is about the skins, not the grape color.

Red wine is made the other way around. Dark grapes are crushed, and the juice ferments together with the skins and seeds, and sometimes the stems. As the alcohol builds up, it pulls color out of the skins, a bit like hot water pulls color out of a tea bag, and it pulls out tannin too. Only after that soaking is the wine pressed off the skins. So skin contact is what makes red wine red, and it is also what gives red wine its drying grip.

Rosé, the pink wine, sits in between. It is usually made from dark grapes, but the juice touches the skins only for a short time, from a few hours up to about a day, before it is pressed off and fermented like a white wine. A short soak means a little color, so you get pink instead of red. There are other ways to make rosé, but short skin contact is the most common.

Orange wine flips the idea again: it is made from white grapes, but with the red wine method. The juice ferments with the skins for days, weeks, or even months. Even white grape skins have some color and some tannin, so the wine comes out deeper gold, amber or orange, with a light grip you would not expect from a white wine. People also call it skin-contact white wine, which describes how it is made.

Sparkling wine is about the gas. Remember that fermentation makes carbon dioxide. If the wine is sealed while it ferments, the gas cannot escape, so it dissolves into the wine under pressure and comes back out as bubbles when you open the bottle. There are several ways to do this. Some winemakers start a second fermentation inside each closed bottle, and some do it in big pressure tanks. Some bottle the wine before its first fermentation has finished, and some simply pump carbon dioxide into a finished still wine, the way soda is made. Each gives a different style, but for now the picture is enough: sparkling wine is wine that kept its gas.

Sweet wine is wine that kept some of its sugar, and winemakers get there in a few ways. They can stop the yeast before it finishes, for example by chilling the wine. Or they can start with grapes that have extra sugar packed in, because the grapes were dried, frozen on the vine, or shriveled by a helpful mold called noble rot. With that much sugar, the yeast cannot eat it all.

Fortified wine is wine with spirit added, and spirit here means strong distilled alcohol made from grapes. If it is added while the wine is still fermenting, the high alcohol stops the yeast, so the wine stays sweet and also ends up strong. Port, from Portugal, is made this way. If the spirit is added after fermentation has finished, the wine is dry but still strong. Fino Sherry, from Spain, is a dry fortified wine.

So there are seven families: white, red, rosé, orange, sparkling, sweet and fortified. Each one comes back to a choice: skins out, skins in, skins for a short time, white grapes left on their skins, gas trapped, sugar kept, or spirit added. If you remember the choice, you can picture the wine before you ever see it.

That is also why looking at a glass is useful, because the choices leave marks you can see.

How to look at and smell a wine

Now for the practical part, taken slowly. Here is what you need if you want to follow along.

You need a clear glass. A plain wine glass is best, ideally one with a bowl that is wider at the bottom and narrows toward the top, like a tulip, because that shape lets you swirl without spilling and holds the smell in. Any clear, clean glass will do to start. Skip colored or patterned glass, which hides what you are looking for.

You need something white behind the glass, such as a sheet of printer paper, a white napkin or a white plate. Daylight is ideal. In the evening, use a plain white light rather than a warm, yellow lamp, because yellow light tints everything.

You need a small pour. A common professional tasting pour is about fifty milliliters, roughly three or four tablespoons. A normal bottle holds seven hundred fifty milliliters, so one bottle gives about fifteen pours that size. A small pour is not stingy: it leaves room in the glass to swirl, and it means you are paying attention to the wine rather than drinking it.

You need a clean nose, so try to avoid perfume, scented hand lotion or strong food smells right before you start, because those get in the way.

If you want to try this, pick two ordinary bottles, one white and one red. They do not need to be special. Any everyday white and any everyday red from a grocery store is perfect, because the point is the difference between them. Pour a small amount of each into its own glass.

One more thing, and it matters: if you taste, you can spit. Professional tasters spit all the time. They keep a cup or bowl nearby, called a spittoon, and nobody thinks twice about it. When you are tasting several wines, spitting keeps your head clear and lets you notice more. And today you do not need to taste at all, because everything in this lesson happens with your eyes and your nose.

Start with your eyes. Hold the glass by the stem, if it has one, so your hand does not warm the wine or smudge the bowl. Hold it over the white paper and tip it away from you to about a forty-five degree angle, halfway between upright and lying flat. The wine spreads out into a slope, deep near the middle and thin near the edge, which lets you see it at different thicknesses all at once.

You are looking for three things: clarity, color, and depth of color.

Clarity comes first. Is the wine clear, or is it hazy? Most wine you buy is bright and clear, with light passing cleanly through it, while hazy wine looks cloudy, like water with a little milk stirred in. Haze can be a warning sign. It can mean something went wrong, such as bacteria growing in the bottle or a fermentation starting up again when it should not have. But haze is not always a problem. Some winemakers choose not to filter their wines, and those can look slightly cloudy on purpose, as can some sparkling wines that were bottled before fermentation ended and kept a little sediment. So clarity gives you a question, not a verdict. If a wine is hazy, the next step is to find out whether it was meant to be.

Next comes color. Look at the slope against the white paper and try to name what you see.

For white wines, the scale runs from lemon-green, which is pale yellow with a green tint, through lemon and gold to amber and finally brown. Most young white wines sit at the lemon end. A wine that has gone gold or amber may have spent time in a wooden barrel, may be older, or may come from very ripe grapes, and a white wine that has turned brown has usually gone past its best.

For rosé, the scale runs from pink, to a pink-orange that people often call salmon, to orange.

For red wines, the scale runs from purple, to ruby, which is a clear red, to garnet, which is red with a brownish edge, and finally to tawny, a brown-orange. Young red wines lean purple, and as a red wine ages it slowly loses its purple and moves toward brick and brown. You see this first at the edge of the slope, so look at the thin rim of the wine. In a young red the rim is often purple, while in an older red it may look orange or brown even when the middle still looks red.

Third is depth, which is how intense the color is, from pale, to medium, to deep.

For a white wine, look at how far the color reaches across the slope. If it looks almost like water near the edge, it is pale, and if the yellow stays strong right up to the rim, it is deep.

For a red, there is a simple test. Set the glass upright and look straight down through the middle of the wine toward the stem below. If you can see the stem easily, the wine is pale. If the wine is so dark you cannot see the stem at all, it is deep, and medium is in between.

Try it with your two glasses. The white will almost certainly look lemon or pale gold, and pale to medium in depth. The red will look purple or ruby, and depending on the grape, you will likely see a clear difference at the stem test. That difference already tells you something. A deep, inky red usually comes from a grape with thick, dark skins, or from a long soak on the skins, while a pale, see-through red often comes from a thin-skinned grape. Pinot noir, the grape the Willamette Valley is best known for, is one of those thin-skinned grapes, and it comes back at the end of this lesson.

Color has limits, though. It cannot tell you whether a wine is good: a pale red is not a weak red, and a deep red is not a better one. It cannot tell you exactly how old a wine is, only which way it might be leaning, and it cannot tell you the price or whether you will like it. What color does well is give you clues about the grape, the skin contact, wood aging and age, and you will check those clues later with your nose and your tongue.

While the glass is tilted, you may notice something else. When you set it upright, wine slides back down the inside of the glass in thin streaks, which people call legs or tears. They form mainly because alcohol evaporates from the thin film of wine on the glass faster than water does, and that difference pulls the film into streaks. More alcohol tends to mean more pronounced legs, and sugar makes them slower and thicker. Either way, they are not a sign of quality. If you see bubbles that keep rising from the bottom, the wine is sparkling, or at least lightly fizzy.

Now the nose.

Before you swirl, take one gentle sniff of the still wine. This first sniff checks whether the wine is clean, meaning it smells sound and free of faults, and a few faults are easy to catch here. Wine that smells like damp cardboard or a musty basement may be what people call corked. Wine that smells flat, like a bruised apple that has gone brown, may be oxidized, meaning it has taken in too much air. Wine that smells of rotten eggs has a fault called reduction. A faint struck-match or flint note comes from reduction too, but some winemakers aim for it on purpose, in some Chardonnays for example, so reduction counts as a fault when it dominates the wine. And wine that smells sharply of vinegar or nail polish remover has a fault called volatile acidity. That means too much acetic acid, the acid in vinegar, along with a compound called ethyl acetate that forms beside it and gives the nail polish remover smell. Each of these gets its own lesson later. For now, the point is simply to notice whether anything smells clearly wrong before you go looking for good smells.

Then swirl. Set the glass flat on the table, keep the base down, and move it in small circles, as if you were drawing little loops. The wine climbs the sides and spreads into a thin film, which lets more of the smell escape into the empty space above the wine, where your nose can reach it. This is another reason a small pour helps, since a full glass would spill.

After swirling, bring the glass to your nose and take short sniffs. Two or three quick, light sniffs work better than one long, deep breath, because your nose gets used to a smell very fast, sometimes within a few seconds, and then it stops noticing. Short sniffs keep it fresh. Then take the glass away, breathe normally, and try again. If you are not sure what you smell, that is normal, so pull away, wait a moment, and come back.

First, judge intensity, meaning how strong the smell is. There are three steps: light, medium and pronounced. A rough test is distance. If you can smell the wine clearly while the glass is still a few inches from your nose, it is pronounced, and if you have to put your nose right into the glass and breathe in carefully to get anything, it is light. Medium is in between. Compare your two glasses this way, and you may find that one comes at you from a distance while the other makes you lean in.

Then try to sort what you smell into broad groups. Do not reach for exact words yet. Start with big families.

Fruit is usually the first one people notice. In white wines, think of citrus like lemon and grapefruit, green fruit like apple and pear, stone fruit like peach and apricot, or tropical fruit like pineapple and mango. In red wines, think of red fruit like cherry, strawberry and raspberry, or black fruit like blackberry, black cherry and plum.

Flowers come next, since some wines smell of blossom or of violets.

Spice and herb make another group. Some wines smell of black pepper, mint, cut grass or green bell pepper, and some smell of sweeter spices like vanilla or clove, which often come from aging in wooden barrels.

Earth is the last broad group. Some wines, especially older reds, smell of damp soil, forest floor, mushrooms or leather.

Pick one group first. Ask yourself whether the wine smells more like fruit or more like earth. If it is fruit, is it closer to lemon or closer to cherry, and is it fresh fruit or cooked fruit, like jam? Each question cuts the field in half. You are not trying to match a famous description. You are learning to sort, and the exact words will come with practice.

Some of these smells come from the grape itself. Others come from the winemaker, such as the toasty or vanilla notes from oak barrels, or a buttery smell from a step after fermentation. Nearly all red wines go through that step, but only some whites do, and it is in whites, such as many Chardonnays, that the buttery smell tends to show. Still others come from age. Each of those three sources gets a lesson of its own later, and for now it is enough to notice that the groups exist.

Here is the whole routine in order, so you can run it with a glass in hand.

1. Pour a small amount into a clear glass and hold it over something white.
2. Tilt the glass and note clarity, color and depth, checking the rim for color changes.
3. Take one gentle sniff before swirling to check that the wine smells clean.
4. Swirl, then take short sniffs and judge whether the smell is light, medium or pronounced.
5. Sort what you smell into broad groups such as fruit, flower, spice and earth.

If you did that with a white and a red, you now have a small description of each, built from what you saw and smelled rather than from whether you liked them. That is the habit this whole course depends on. Liking a wine is fine, but being able to say what is in the glass is a separate skill, and it can be learned.

The Willamette Valley as home ground

Now to the place this course keeps coming back to. The Willamette Valley lies in western Oregon, running north to south between the Coast Range to the west and the Cascade Mountains to the east, from around Portland down toward Eugene. Every idea in these lessons gets tested against what it looks like there.

Its climate is cool. Winters and springs are wet, with a lot of rain, and summers are dry and warm but not hot for long. Cool air from the Pacific Ocean pushes in through gaps in the Coast Range, especially a low gap called the Van Duzer Corridor, and that ocean air keeps summer heat in check. This shows up in the glass. When grapes ripen slowly in cool weather, they tend to hold on to their fresh, sharp quality instead of getting too sugary too fast.

That climate suits Pinot noir, the valley's leading grape, and this is where the stem test pays off. Pinot noir is a red grape with thin skins, and thin skins mean less color to pull out, so Pinot noir is often pale to medium in depth and frequently ruby rather than inky purple. In a glass, a Willamette Pinot noir will often let you see the stem. That is not a weakness; it is what the grape is. The valley grows other grapes too, among them Pinot gris, Chardonnay and Pinot blanc, but Pinot noir leads.

One story about the valley needs correcting right away. You may hear that the Willamette Valley sits at the same latitude as Burgundy in France, the famous home of Pinot noir. Latitude means how far north of the equator a place is. The forty-fifth parallel, the line roughly halfway between the equator and the North Pole, does run through the Willamette Valley, which stretches from about forty-three and three quarters degrees north to about forty-five and three quarters. Burgundy sits further north, from a little over forty-six degrees to nearly forty-eight. Bordeaux is one French region that matches the valley's latitude, sitting right around the forty-fifth parallel too, and the northern part of the Rhône Valley is another.

So the valley shares Bordeaux's latitude, not Burgundy's. Burgundy lies one to three degrees north of the forty-fifth parallel, and even the valley's northern end falls about half a degree short of where Burgundy begins. What the valley really shares with Burgundy is a cool climate, which is why the same grape does well in both places. Even so, the two are cool in different ways. Burgundy is inland, with cold winters, spring frosts, and rain and hail in summer, while the Willamette Valley sits near the ocean, with wet winters and dry summers. It is the same grape in two cool places, but not the same latitude and not the same weather.

If you have a bottle of Oregon Pinot noir nearby, or any red at all, you can do one thing today. Pour a small amount into a clear glass, hold it over a white sheet of paper, and look straight down at the stem. Decide whether the wine is pale, medium or deep. Then take a few short sniffs and name one broad group: fruit, flower, spice or earth. That single word is your first tasting note. The next lesson moves from the nose to the tongue, starting with sweetness and acidity.