There’s a danger in knowing too much about wine: you may start speaking in tongues. The upside is by the time the words ‘freshly-picked amyl nitrate’ start rolling off your tongue, you’ll be too far gone to mind.

But wine jargon can seem pretty impenetrable to the uninitiated. The secret is while no wine actually tastes of “wet straw” or “strawberries”, there are specific sensations wine drinkers call “tack room leather”, which is actually a way of describing the perception of a brettanomyces fungus that’s infected the wine.

Nick Veanes, wine merchant for Dan Murphy’s in Victoria, understands our confusion. “The toughest thing in the whole wine industry is describing the taste of wine in a way anyone can understand,” he says. “We’re all starting to use similar words to describe similar things.”

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Veanes was also a judge in Dan Murphy’s inaugural Decoded Wine Awards, a new initiative for wine-lovers seeking a guide to wines both over and under the $20 benchmark. We asked Veanes to translate his learnings from the judging process and relay a few simple concepts we can use to lay the foundation for a great grape vocabulary.

Smell, listen and drink slowly
The most important thing is to sniff things. Most of what you’re tasting in a wine can be picked up with smell alone.

“If someone puts a glass of wine in front of you, you can smell whether it’s a thick-skinned grape or a thin-skinned grape,” says Veanes. “You can tell whether it’s youthful or developed. [Then] when you taste the wine, you’re really just trying to confirm that what you smell is correct. The palate and the nose should line up pretty well.”

Tasting wine is not a competition to find the craziest flavour – it’s not a good sign if you can smell something that twenty other can’t. So look for the characteristics already raised.

“In a tasting environment, you’ll often pick up a smell after someone has mentioned it,” says Veanes. “Have a list of common wine terms and circle the ones you identify, because that’s easier than taking a blank piece of paper and trying to write them down.”

And don’t chug: you can’t taste something that never actually hits your tongue.

Body
When we’re talking about body, we’re talking about viscosity – the sense of the wine’s weight in your mouth. You should be able to pick this up by simply swishing the wine around in the glass.

“Is it like water, or is it like full-cream milk? If you have Big M [chocolate milk] in your mouth, it’s full-bodied,” explains Veanes.

Fruit-Forward
Referring to a wine with prevalent fruit flavours, ‘fruit-forward’ is a particular style in wine making.

“The number one thing you’re looking for [in wine] is the fruit character,” says Veanes. “You’re trying to pick up what kind of flavours are in there – are they tropical notes, or more cool-climate citrus notes? If it’s a red wine, is it more about red fruits or deeper and richer?”

Acid
Acid sounds like it would make something taste bad, but in wine it’s delicious. Acids – tartaric, malic and lactic – are an essential component of grapes. As the fruit starts to ripen, these acids convert into sugars, which the yeast uses to make alcohol. All wines will be, to some degree, acidic. “If it’s low-acid, it’s not very nice,” says Veanes, as acids produce flavours we think of as ‘fresh’, ‘tart’ or ‘sour’ – exactly the kind of flavours we love in wine.

There’s an easy way to assess how acidic a wine tastes. “The more saliva you produce [while tasting], the higher the acid [levels],” Veanes says. Acid levels are also a good indication of a wine’s cellaring potential, as acidity in wine acts as a preservative.

Tannin
Tannins are a type of organic chemical found in the skin, stem and seeds of a grape that produce the sensation of astringency – that puckering feeling in your mouth.

“Tannins are perhaps the most important structural component of red wine,” says Veanes. “They break down into a polymer, and when they go into your mouth, they cling to the sides. That’s why reds pair so well with steak – because it bonds with the proteins and mellows out the tannins.”

Identifying tannin is fun wine-nerd training: line up three bottles of wine and taste the difference between silky, moderate and chalky. Veanes suggests Xanadu’s bolshy cabernet sauvigon for an example of hardcore tannins; some Z Wine Rustica Grenache for medium-weight; and Seppelt’s excellent pinot meunier for a demonstration of the smooth.

Herbaciousness
Herbacious flavours – lemongrass, aniseed, basil, pepper, tomato leaf, green parsley, thyme, mint, fennel or eucalyptus – are the result of a group of compounds called methoxypyrazines found in certain wines, the most well-known of which is sauvignon blanc.

“People can really narrow it down to wet grass, which is undesirable,” says Veanes. “But if you’re smelling it balanced with the fruits and the tannins, [methoxypyrazines] can make for a fantastic wine.”

The best way to identify the herbaceous methoxypyrazine flavour, Veanes says, is to drink a bottle or two of the Craggy Range from Marlborough. “It tastes like lemongrass, but it’s not overpowering,” he says. “If [that flavour isn’t] there, it doesn’t taste like a sav blanc should.”

Oak and ‘Creaminess’
The judicious application of oak remains an essential part of making wine. When white wines are picked, they’re stuffed into a freshly-coopered oak barrel where they sit and sweat. Once the yeast starts bubbling, it begins to interact with the wood. “You begin to sacrifice freshness in the fruit,” says Veanes. “But that warmth extracts those vanilla, sweet, and toasty notes from the barrel. So it’s a bit of give-and-take.”

The other term associated with ‘oakiness’ – particularly in chardonnay – is ‘creamy,’ which is a result of malolactic fermentation, a secondary stage in which the bacteria begins eating the acids once it’s finished gorging on sugar. “That’s what brings in that creaminess,” says Veanes. “In a chardonnay, the by-product is the ‘butteriness’.”

Winemakers once prized oak in chardonnay. But in modern times winemakers are more restrained with the application of oak. Wines like the Devil's Lair Hidden Cave chardonnay and the Fowles’ astoundingly affordable Farm to Table number are sharp, fresh and complicated.

See how these wines fared and more in the full list of finalists and winners of the Dan Murphy’s inaugural Decoded Wine Awards.

This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Dan Murphy’s.