Read and listen to first hand podcasts from vineyards and wineries all over South Africa.
Before moving on, there is something else about the color of our claret. Tilt the glass 45 degrees and hold a white paper in the background. You can squint a little. Look in the middle of your glass. This is the so called core of the wine. Round the edges is the so called rim of the wine.
The distance between the core and the rim will be different depending on how developed the wine is. They start out with little or no separation between the core and rim but as red wines age this distance is going to grow. More, the color of the rim is going to change as well. Fortunately it will change in a way we are already familiar with from the previous page. Purple-pink-ruby-garnet-tawny-brown. Remember? The rim follows this pattern, however it is always ahead of the core in this respect. So a ruby core wine may have garnet or tawny rim but it is quite impossible that a ruby core wine would have a purple rim!
So, by now you know how the core and rim of the wine tells you about it's relative age, and you are familiar with the meaning of the appearance of the 'legs'.
Take a deep breath and ... hang on ... is it not a better idea to sniff carefully?
The nose of the wine...
Indeed, spare your nose and know that it can get tired very easily. We humans can differenciate between thousands of aromas, yet for most of us it is difficult to identify even those we encounter day by day in our lives or at least those that are accessible. Can you tell the scent of a cinnmon stick for cloves? The scent of a fresh strawberry for a ripe apple?
We are taught to read, write, but we are not taught to smell.
Fortunately everyone can expand his 'vocabulary of scents' through training. It is like learning a foreign language. The bigger is your vocabulary, the better you speak the language. This is no different when it comes to the language of claret.
