Can one really get a true taste of a wine when spitting?
If you haven’t practiced evaluating a wine after spitting, I’m not surprised you found it strange or difficult. But if you don’t spit, you’ll have much more difficulty evaluating 15 or 20 wines in a sitting, as a professional wine taster must often do; the accumulated alcohol would definitely impair your judgment. With training and experience, you’ll find that a swish and a spit gives you all the information you needa wine’s flavors will impact your taste buds and ricochet around your retronasal passages whether or not you swallow it. It just takes practice. Of course, when it comes to pleasure, swallowing has it hands down over spitting.
