The trick to tasting wine is about the aftertaste.

Let's do an exercise! Take a lemon, an orange, and a tangerine. Squeeze them and divide their juices into three different glasses. At this point, pinch your nose and taste them one after the other… try especially to distinguish them and assign each one to its respective fruit. It will be extremely difficult… you probably won’t manage. Why?
Simply because you are tasting using only the senses of your mouth, so you will only perceive the acidity at the extreme sides of your palate and, perhaps, for the orange and tangerine, also the sweet sensation on the tip of your tongue. But you don’t have the perception of the aromas that help you distinguish the types of citrus fruits.
You need the so-called “retro-nose”, that is, the nasal cavity. In fact, if you clear your nose, when you swallow, the light and volatile aromas rise along the nasal septum and hit the mucous membranes that will discriminate the various scents, recalling the memories we have created since we were young.

So, if you have a cold, it’s not worth tasting. And this applies not only to wines but to all the products we ingest. The retro-nose is important in wine because it defines the more sensitive aromatic characteristics like the scents of red fruit for red wines, the sensation of peach or apricot in white wines, the sensation of wildflower honey and toasted almonds in some Passito from Pantelleria.

So, it’s forbidden to get cold before tasting… even if in the end, many times we drink to warm ourselves up!

Fabio De Vecchi