Tips from the somms: simple ways for industry professionals to improve their palates

Yesterday, Drinks Trade invited 11 sommeliers to partake in the annual Champagne and Sparkling Wine Tasting Panel. For 2024, this panel boasts some of Australia’s strongest palates and persons in wine, including Matt Irwin, Ed Carr (who featured in this interview article yesterday), Christine Ricketts, and Matt Dunne. 

Drinks Trade took the opportunity to sit down with some of these panel members to ask what advice they would give to already wine-knowledgeable industry professionals that are looking to improve their palates. 

“So first of all, you want to look at how it all comes together as a wine,” said Matt Irwin, who in addition to being a Certified Educator and Asia Pacific APP Development Manager at WSET is also a Stage 2 Master of Wine Student.

“You want to be able to see: is this wine perfectly balanced between its acidity, its body, its alcohol, and its fruit concentration, [and] if it all comes together and there's nothing really poking out; that gives a really good idea in terms of its quality. Also, how long does it linger on the palate for, and does it show different facets of itself, with different layers of complexity exposing over its finish? And really, your personal opinion of is it an enjoyable wine? Would you want to have another glass of it? If you can bring that into words, then you will become a much better describer and assessor of the wine.”

Leading wine judge & communicator and current Joval Wines ambassador Matt Dunne says that keeping the end consumer in mind is vital when properly evaluating a wine: “when I judge any wine, I always have my consumer hat on," he said.

"After working in restaurants for many years, I'm like, would a customer enjoy this wine or is it just me being a wine nerd and pulling the wine apart?” 

Christine Ricketts, WSET Educator at Endeavour Drinks Group, added, “my biggest thing is [that they say] really never have a coffee beforehand… to have a clean palate. But, [for example] if you are a smoker, at university my lecturer sent me out to have a cigarette before every major wine tasting, because I knew how to taste as a smoker. So if you're a heavy coffee drinker, I'd do the same, because your palate does adjust to what your flavours are, however if you only have one or two every now and then, make sure you've got a clean palate, that's my biggest thing.”

The category of Champagne and Sparkling presents its own challenges to tasters.

Matt Dunne said, “I think sparkling is quite tricky when it comes to bubbles. When you're analysing wines from scratch, bubbles can affect how you read acidity and how you read fruit.

"When tasting wines blind like today, it's about fruit first/what comes at you - is a tropical fruit/is a stone fruit/citrus/green fruit - and then is there any autolysis/is there any kind of wine making in regards to time on lees or is it made in a style that's like tank fermented.

Mat Irwin added, “so with champagne, you obviously have to incorporate the bubble and the fine perlage (or the bead) that covers your mouth and how does that interact with the wine. It has a bitter undertone so you want it to be able to cut through what can have a little bit of sweetness within the wine and how that balance interplays between the shape of the bubble and the consistency of the bubble and how that finishes on your palate as well. We want to see that there is a complexity through the fruit showing most citrus and stone fruits but also the winemaking is an important part of it.

Christine Ricketts added that “sparkling wine can be harder because of the bubbles and the acidity in it. It can actually really make life a lot harder in that way, because you get the acidity, and acid naturally adds length, so you think, oh yeah, this wine's got length, and it's got this and that, but in reality, maybe it doesn't. It comes down to practice.”

In addition to Ed Carr, Matt Dunne, Matt Irwin, and Christine Riccketts, the 2024 Drinks Trade Champagne and Sparkling Tasting Panel also featured Barthelemy Degouy, Helena Edgerton, Emeline Troger, Kasia Sobiesiak, Iain Wood, Thibinet Courville, and Carlos Guerra.

More insights from the results and the panel will be published to the website soon.