How To Choose The Perfect Wine

This wine video will give you some great tips to select and serve the best glass of wine for your meal.

Rebecca: Hi I am Rebecca Braton and welcome to watchmojo.com, today I will be asking everything that you wanted to know about wine, but were afraid to ask. I am speaking with Carola Price Sommelier about everything from wine aging to what of glass you use. Carola: You have your dry wines, your sweet wines, your fruity wines; you have a finish, a nose, a bouquet—these are all very important when tasting wine. There’s acidity, there’s balance, that’s when you get more into wine drinking. Rebecca: What do we have to take into account, when were choosing a wine to go with a meal. Carola: You want to deal with weight always, and medium weight wines, go with medium weight food. You cannot have a very, very light 8% alcohol wine to go with a halibut. Because Halibut we know to be very meaty fish. Rebecca: When you say, weight of the wine, you mean the percent of alcohol. Carola: One of the cheating methods is to look at the alcohol level. You’re going to see that one that’s lighter in alcohol, it would be generally lighter in flavor, also sometimes when you just get better and practice makes perfect, you get to know that certain grapes are lighter than other grapes. Rebecca: Is the rule, red meat-red wine, is that something to go by? Carola: If you don’t know and you’ve just started drinking wine, then yes that is the rule to go by. Once you’ve started, drinking wine your getting more practice, you understand that there’s a ton of grapes out there and they all go well with all sorts of dishes. Rebecca: Let’s talk about different aromas. Carola: Well, we go into components of earth, vegetal, there’s barnyard scents, there’s baking scents, and fruit scents. These are all to do with the type of grape and the wine making itself. Rebecca: What type of wines comes from what regions like, let’s say, does Italy make a dry wine? Carla? It doesn’t work that way, it's always again with the grapes. We have a wonderful word ‘Terroir’ and we take that, that everybody in the world will make a Cabernet Sauvignon. Why? Because people drink it and because you can sell it. Rebecca: How important would you say that temperature of the wine is when serving it? Carola: It’s always better to be cold and it can warm up in the glass, then be too hot and then you have to try to cool it off with ice cubes or something like that. It’s just horrendous. When you’re serving wine, you’ve really want to have it about 18-degrees, may be 16-degrees. Rebecca: Do different types of wines need to be served in different styles or sizes of glasses? Carola: It all depends, you definitely want something light and easy to handle, you want a long stem and needs to be thin. Crystal obviously would be the best, but if the glass is thin, you’re going to have a great wine. Rebecca: What could cause a person to send a wine back in a restaurant, other than they just didn’t like it. Carola: The only fault why the wine gets sent back is because of cork, and it’s really the only reason—it would be a cork taint. It’s not much reason to use cork because only 10% of the world’s wines are meant for aging over 10years. Rebecca: But the cork has something to do with the aging then? Carola: They’re minute little bubbles in there and that gives you the ultimate aging time, whereas the plastic it has no bubbles whatsoever. So what goes in is exactly what’s going to come out.