Common habit could be sabotaging your wine-drinking experience: expert

If you want to experience a wine’s full range of flavors, sipping water before or between tastes may seem like a natural way to cleanse your palate — but a sommelier says it could keep you from tasting the wine as intended.“Anything you take in your mouth before your first sip of wine is going to alter its true colors,” New York-based sommelier and wine educator Sarah Looper told Fox News Digital.To judge a wine accurately, Looper recommends giving it a few tastes.The first sip of wine “sets the tone,” she said.

It’s at this point that you should also smell the wine.“Because we smell better with our mouths, if we put those aromatic molecules on our mouth first, we’ll actually smell the wine better when it comes to our second sip, because you’re adapting your palate to what the wine really is,” she said.Looper is describing a process called retronasal olfaction, which happens when aromas from food or drink travel from the mouth to the nose, affecting how we perceive flavor.People’s palates also vary, Looper said, pointing to differences in factors such as oral pH and taste sensitivity.“What you put on your palate, whether it’s a sugary and highly acidic and effervescent Coca-Cola, or a sip of something like an Old Fashioned that’s really alcoholic and really sweet and woody, that will totally jack your palate,” she said. “You can’t go from something like that and then move into your wine and expect your brain and your palate to be able to evaluate it.”The key to resetting your palate isn’t water, but patience, Looper said.Morning Report delivers the latest news, videos, photos and more.

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Never miss a story.“You have to give yourself a little bit of time and then take a first sip of that wine, adapt your brain to what you’re tasting and then take a second sip,” s...