Tasting and evaluating wine adds to its pleasure.  There are some basic time-tested standards for wine tasting but the most basic rules to follow are to use your own words to describe a wine, create your own list of terms and take notes.
Tasting wine uses every sense: smell, sight, taste, touch and even hearing.  The most important sense when tasting wine is smell. Humans can remember smells (not always a good thing) and smells can elicit very strong memories. Humans can smell and differentiate between thousands of substances but we can only taste four (some would argue five): sweet, sour, salt, bitter and the questionable fifth, umami.  There is no umami in wine and only a few wines have any detectable salinity.  So a wines’ taste will have varying degrees of  sweet, sour and/or bitter. 
 
Here are the basics of tasting wine:

• Look at the wine:  Visual clues are the first step in describing a wine.  Look for a wine with good clarity.  A cloudy wine may be an unfiltered wine that was served improperly but it could also be a flaw. The color of the wine is also important.  All wines as they age get brown.  Red wines will get lighter with age and white wines will get darker. A wine that is brown like a tawny port or sherry is usually past its prime.  With sparkling wine, look for the frequency and size of the bubbles.

• Smell the wine:  Don’t swirl the glass yet.  Stick your nose in the wine glass and take a good sniff.  If there a flaw like TCA (it makes wine smell like a moldy basement), it will set up in the glass and be at its highest detection level before swirling.  If it smells fresh and clean it is OK to continue.

• Swirl the glass:  To swirl the wine, hold the stem of the wineglass and move the glass in an oval as opposed to a circle.  This will coat the sides of the glass with wine and increase evaporation and release of bouquet.

• Smell the wine again: Take several big sniffs and note what you smell. There is a difference between aroma and bouquet.  The aroma is the smell of the grape varietal and the bouquet is the combined smells of the aroma and any wine making process such as the addition of oak and/or aging. 

• Taste the wine:  The part we have all been waiting for.  Take a good amount of wine into the mouth and swish it around before swallowing or spitting.  The first question to resolve is do you like the wine.  Notice how the wine tastes.  How does the wine feel in the mouth?  Is it full bodied like heavy cream or is it light bodied like skim milk.

• Evaluate the wine for 1 minute:  The minute following tasting the wine is very important in its evaluation.  Notice how long the wine lingers.  Does it have a pleasant aftertaste?  Do the flavors stay in balance or does its taste fall apart and become bitter or astringent or something worse.

• Taste the wine with food:  Every wine will change significantly with food – if the opportunity presents itself, taste the wine with the food and note the change. 

• Other tasting tips:  If you need to rinse your glass do not use water instead use wine.  Do not wear perfume to wine tastings.  The only thing that can clean your palate between wines is time.

 
 
Wine in its most basic form is fermented grape juice.  At the same time, wine is a product and subject worthy of study.  The main reasons to attend wine tastings, is to find out what wines to buy and enjoy and it also helps avoid forty dollar experiments when ordering wine in restaurants. 
 
Enjoy!