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If you want to experience a wine’s full range of flavors, sipping water before or between tastes may seem like a natural way to cleanse your palate — but a sommelier says it could keep you from tasting the wine as intended.
“Anything you take in your mouth before your first sip of wine is going to alter its true colors,” New York-based sommelier and wine educator Sarah Looper told Fox News Digital.
To judge a wine accurately, Looper recommends giving it a few tastes. The first sip of wine “sets the tone,” she said. It’s at this point that you should also smell the wine.
“Because we smell better with our mouths, if we put those aromatic molecules on our mouth first, we’ll actually smell the wine better when it comes to our second sip, because you’re adapting your palate to what the wine really is,” she said.
Looper is describing a process called retronasal olfaction, which happens when aromas from food or drink travel from the mouth to the nose, affecting how we perceive flavor.
People’s palates also vary, Looper said, pointing to differences in factors such as oral pH and taste sensitivity.
“What you put on your palate, whether it’s a sugary and highly acidic and effervescent Coca-Cola, or a sip of something like an Old Fashioned that’s really alcoholic and really sweet and woody, that will totally jack your palate,” she said.
“You can’t go from something like that and then move into your wine and expect your brain and your palate to be able to evaluate it.”
The key to resetting your palate isn’t water, but patience, Looper said.
“You have to give yourself a little bit of time and then take a first sip of that wine, adapt your brain to what you’re tasting and then take a second sip,” she said.
“And it’s that second sip, and even that third sip, that will really set the wine in your brain and on your mouth for what it’s supposed to be.”
The flavors in wine also evolve after it is poured and interacts with oxygen, Food & Wine reported, so wine may taste different several minutes after the initial sip.
On days when she’s tasting wine in a professional capacity, Looper has a ritual she said is comparable to a professional athlete preparing for game day.
“I will brush my teeth, but early, but then I will have a black coffee early to reset my palate,” she said. “Then I don’t put anything else on my palate except sips of water on my way to the venue.”
Looper’s advice doesn’t mean wine drinkers should avoid staying hydrated, of course.
Rather, she said she prefers to give her palate time to settle before evaluating a wine instead of relying on water immediately beforehand to “reset” it.
It’s easy to get caught up in the so-called rules of tasting wine and pairing it, Looper said.
A simple way to make the most of the experience is to smell the wine first, take a small sip, let it coat your palate, and then pause before taking a second sip to notice how the aromas and flavors develop, she said.
“It’s not so much about right or wrong,” she said. “It’s about, what do you like? What do you enjoy? What tastes good to you? Take those rules, bend them a little bit and see if an alternative [pairing] works. Maybe you’ll love it.”
