Appreciation of colour and brilliance

Before we can begin to talk of winetasting, the basic conditions for tasting must be abestablished. The same type of wine tasted in different glasses appears to be different wine.

For this reason, the winetasting glass has been standardised and has become an instrument with a certain degree of precision, allowing a uniform set of criteria to be established.

The standardised tasting glass (AFNOR) offers the best conditions for tasting the majority of fine table wines, in colour, brilliance, aroma and taste. A specific model is advisable in the case of special wines. It is made of glass, with a minimum of 26% lead, melted with silver sand at 1,500° C. It is handblown, providing it with delicacy and lightness. It has a density of 2.4, while normal glasses have only 2.0.

It is, in short, an intermediate glass between the "caña" of Jerez and the rounded brandy glass.

For tasting, it is filled to a third of its capacity.

The colour and brilliance of the wine can be seen clearly.

Brilliance means the absence of suspended matter and from this point of view a wine can be classed as being cloudy, turbid, "jaro" (a typical Rioja expression), clean, bright or very bright.

Brilliance is obtained by allowing the wine to age in cask in the bodega, followed by clarification. Nevertheless, human eyes do not have sufficient capacity to detect brilliance; a wine with up to a thousand microbes per cubic centimetre can appear bright. Consequently, wines leave the bodega with an adequate level of brightness (from the technical point of view), obtained with clarifiers (gelatine or egg white) which allow the brightness to be maintained for years.

The colour of wine is a blend of the natural colouring which is present in grapes. This blend gives rise to a certain capacity of colour or intensity and a quality or tone.

Grape colouring is basically yellow and is present in the skin and pulp. Red grapes also have red colouring in the skin. The red colouring is called anthocyanin and the yellow, tannin. Therefore, a white wine is yellow; due to the fact that it comes only from white grapes and only has tannins. On the other hand, rosés or red wines have, in addition to the tannin which gives it a yellow colour, a small amount of red in the case of rosé, or a large amount in the case of reds.

With the passing of time, the red colour of the anthocyanin begins to disappear while the tannins oxidise slowly and increase in colour. In this way, a young white wine is straw-coloured and when old, is golden in colour. While a young rosé is bright pink, when old it has a colour similar to "onion skin". A red wine is purple when young and ruby-red when old; it has a "leather-like" colour when very old.

In reality this is not so simple, although there is some truth in this idea. We admit that it is not so simple because maceration plays an important role. It is possible to soak the skins or not, increasing or decreasing the time. All this might lead one to think that red grapes could be used to make white, rosé or red wine.

In the Rioja, grapes have very specific uses, each grape being used to make the wine it is most suited fo:

• Viura...................................White
• Garnacho.............................Rosé
• Tempranillo..........................Red

This being the case it could be understood that there is a variation between quantity and quality of colour. For example, in a glass, two wines can have the same amount of apparent colour, but studied closely one could be pure red and the other have a tendency towards a "leather-like" colour. The explanation of the concept of white, rosé, "claret" and red also fits in with this general idea. A white wine is fermented without skins contrary to a red wine which is fermented with skins until the end, i.e., until it becomes wine. Rosé falls between these two concepts and is fermented without skins but the must comes from a mixture of red and white grapes. A similar case is that of "claret" (today in disuse), which is the fermentation of the red grape on the skins until the wine is only half processed.

The appreciation of colour in a glass requires very specific conditions of light and atmosphere.

Lighting is conditioned by the tradition of using a candle. In this sense, similar types of lighting, such as sun light or lamps with or without halogen filaments can be used. A high reproductivity is advisable; this is difficult to obtain with high or low pressure discharge lamps. Nevertheless, the range of fluorescent lamps is so wide that they can be eliminated systematically. There are models with very high reproductivity, such as TLD-93 and 95. These concepts refer to the quality of illumination. Regarding quality, a minimum amount of 700 Lux for whites, 1,000 for rosés, 1,500 for old red wines and 4,000 for young reds.

The environment should have a high reflective value of over 65; this is given in white, at the most with a blue-violet tendency, but not yellow.