Tasting
How I taste wine, why the biodynamic calendar matters, and seven practical tips for home.
How I taste wine
The bottle has been on the table for an hour before I open it. Not a ritual to impress anyone. The glass has a purpose, the temperature does too, and that half-hour wait isn't patience. It's the time the wine needs to become itself.
I don't taste to give scores. I taste to remember. A wine I can't bring back into my head tomorrow wasn't anything special.
I want tension. Not sweetness and not acidity as separate parameters, but the moment they hold each other in balance or deliberately pull apart. A wine without tension is furniture.
The rest is method. Look first, then smell, then taste. First quietly, then with attention to what shifts over five minutes. A Champagne five minutes into the glass tells a different story than at the first sip. I listen to the second story.
The biodynamic calendar
Maria Thun was a German farmer who started an experiment in 1952 that ran for decades. She planted potatoes on different days and tracked what it did to the taste. Her findings became the biodynamic calendar: four kinds of days, each tied to the moon's position relative to a constellation.
Fruit days fall when the moon stands before Aries, Leo or Sagittarius. Flower days before Gemini, Libra or Aquarius. Leaf days before Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces. Root days before Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn.
Whether you can make this scientifically airtight is a different conversation. I only know that the same bottle reads more open on a fruit day than on a root day, and that producers like Nicolas Joly time their bottling around it.
In practice I work like this
- Fruit days: wines whose signature is fruit. Burgundy Pinot Noir, Riesling, Beaujolais, young Champagne. Anything that lives on clarity.
- Flower days: aromatic and floral. Gewürztraminer, Muscat, Albariño, older Champagnes where fruit has shifted into something more perfumed.
- Leaf days: mildly unfavourable for tasting. The wine flattens, structure is there but fruit sits behind glass. Useful for analytical work, not for pleasure.
- Root days: avoid serious tastings. The wine reads closed, sometimes even faintly musty. Good day for cellar work, filing notes, reading about wine instead of drinking it.
I plan blind tastings on fruit or flower days. Importer samples I open whenever they arrive, but I save the proper note for a second session if the timing was bad. Writing off a wine once because I drank it on a root day: I've done that too often to laugh about it now.
Fourteen days ahead
Calendar generated on 28 April 2026. Refreshes automatically on every site update. Source: Maria Thun's Aussaattage, with astronomical computation per Jean Meeus.
Tips & tools
The glass changes what you taste
No Bordeaux out of a tulip flute. No Champagne out of something cylindrical. A neutral Zalto Universal or an ISO tasting glass covers ninety percent of what you need for serious work. The rest is trophy.
Cool sooner than warm
White wine at 8°C becomes 11°C on its own in a few minutes. White wine at 12°C never goes back to 9°C without another ice bucket. Champagne at 7°C is right for a serious bottle. For party-drinking, lower.
Water and unsalted bread
Not to rinse your palate, that's a myth. To slow down the physical experience so you actually taste instead of swallow. Bread absorbs fat, water resets temperature in your mouth.
Write the first impression down within fifteen seconds
After that you start rationalising and you lose the essence. One word. One image. One connection. Structure, acidity, finish, tannin: all of that comes second.
No perfume, no candles, no fried fish
A wine's nose is more fragile than most people realise. The room you taste in is the instrument you taste with. Treat it that way.
Taste blind, regularly
Not to win quizzes. To find out how often label bias is doing your work. One blind bottle a week, twenty euros maximum, with someone who'll also be honest. You learn more in a month than in a year of seeing what you're drinking.
Keep one bottle you know well
An anchor wine. Something you drink every month and whose shape you know cold. You measure everything else against that bottle, not against a point scale. My anchor right now: Egly-Ouriet Brut Tradition. Next year maybe something else.