River cruise wine tastings can give you a deeper understanding of wine production, wine types, and how to pair them up with the right foods to enhance the flavours of both. They can also give you a closer look at the countries and cultures that produce wine, and how it’s helped to shape local life.

You can enjoy river cruise wine tastings aboard your ship, or you might head for the vineyards in your river cruise destinations. If you’ve never been to a tasting before, it might all seem like a bit of a mystery. So, what exactly can you expect on river cruise wine tastings?

A wine tasting could be an informal stand-around gathering or a more comprehensive, sit-down seminar. Folks attending a wine tasting on river cruises may have a range of prior experience, or none at all – so whatever your own experience with wine tastings on river cruises, you’re bound to make some new friends and find people in the same boat (no pun intended).

What you can learn

River cruise wine tastings are led by experts who can dissect a wine for its flavours– and they can pass this experience on to you. A tasting can tell you which varietals (grape types) and production styles you prefer, so that you’ll know what wines to look out for in future.

River cruise wine tastings can also teach you to pair a good wine with a good meal, to bring out the best in both. This is the kind of knowledge that you can apply every day afterwards, whether you’re on holiday or at home – it’s a refining of your own palate and sense of taste, so in effect it’s an experience that never really leaves you.

How to taste wine

If you’re looking to head into river cruise wine tastings with a little prior knowledge, here’s a quick little step-by-step of the general process:

Looking. Tasting a wine tends to start with first looking at it. Holding the wine against a light background helps you to see its true colour – older reds tend to become browner, whilst older whites grow a little darker with age.

Swirling. Swirling your wine in the glass oxygenates it, helping to release the aromas and giving them a good chance to reach your nose.

Viscosity. Next comes the ‘good legs, full body’ stage, the root of countless corny chat-ups. What you’re looking for is the wine’s viscosity – how quickly or slowly it runs back down the sides of the glass. This tends to be a good indicator of the fullness of the wine, and particularly how alcoholic it is. The longer the wine takes to run back down the glass, the more viscous it is.

Smelling. Sniff your wine from a short distance first, and then bring the glass to your nose. You’re looking for particular aromas, but also checking how good you find the smell. It could be touted as the best wine in the world – but everyone has different tastes, and if you don’t like the smell it’s probably not the wine for you.

Tasting. The trick here is to roll the wine around in your mouth for a little while. As you know, the tongue is divided into sections that pick up different tastes – so allowing the wine to roll around in your mouth gives every part of your tongue time to pick up the full flavour.

Slurping. Spit or drink down your first mouthful, and then with your next taste you’re looking to introduce air into your mouth too. This involves slurping. Try to keep the loud slurps to a minimum (it may be more difficult to suppress slurps and giggles on a longer tasting if you’re following the ‘drink it down’ methodology). Pay attention to the aftertaste too, and then spend a little time trying to find the perfect words to describe your own experience of the taste.

The etiquette

Should I spit? There are many who would view the spitting of wine during river cruise wine tastings to be a terrible waste. But given the amount of wine that could potentially be consumed during a tasting, it makes a lot of sense for the professional tasters not to compromise their sharp judgement by getting drunk. There’s a lot of potential for subsequent glasses to taste increasingly “b-brilliant” and very little besides… but really it’s entirely up to you whether you’d prefer to taste and spit, or to drink it down. Just a word of caution, however; it could be a good idea to eat something substantial aboard your ship during a wine cruise, unless you’re eating something ashore before your tasting.

Smoking. Smoking tends to be discouraged during a wine tasting – tempting though it may be for smokers to pair a few glasses of wine with a tobacco of their choice. The reason for this comes back to the palate; smoke can impair both the the smell and taste of the wine, so it could have an impact on the enjoyment of a wine tasting.

Wearing fragrance. Similarly, it may not work in your favour to wear perfume or aftershave when you’re attending river cruise wine tastings, or anything similarly scented. Half of the wine tasting comes down to the aroma in the glass, and if others are picking up the smell of perfume while they’re getting a feel for their glass of wine, it may not make the more fragrant members of the group very popular.

Speaking up about the taste. It’s generally considered impolite to speak up about what you’re tasting in a wine before others have formed their own opinions. Your best bet may be to wait for the expert to initiate a discussion, so that everyone’s had plenty of time to find the right words to describe their taste experience.

Food combinations

If you’ve already booked a wine tasting river cruise, you don’t need to wait until you sail to start trying some tasty combinations of food and drink. Great foods to pair with a red wine include a good strong cheese, rich-tasting berries, or chocolate. If you prefer white wine, you could try combining a glass with fruit – especially apples, pears and citrus fruits.

There’s no law against pairing a red with fish or a white with red meat – what matters is that you find the wines that you most enjoy, learn to appreciate your favourite flavours, and pair them with foods that you find the most delicious. River cruise wine tastings aren’t just about appreciating the local vintage – it can also teach you to sharpen your palate, and to look for flavours in all your food and drink that you know you’re going to enjoy.

Article images courtesy of D. Kracht, P. King and G. Graham, Photopin.