How To Speak Wine Like You You Know What You’re Talking About

Wine is is an affordable luxury: the options are endless and accessible for a wide range of tastes and budgets. "The thing about wine, aside from being a miracle, is that it is subjective. What you enjoy may not be what someone else enjoys. In other words, there is no one right answer or one right wine," Sayle Milne, certified wine educator and founder of Wine Savvy, tells Refinery29. But, sipping wine is very different from speaking wine — a sophisticated language we oftentimes fake with practised phrases like, "I'm in the mood for full-bodied red," or "Chardonnays are too oaky for me."

In order to transform yourself from a fast-casual sipper into a pseudo-sommelier, you don't need years of experience, costly classes, or even an extensive vocabulary on the subject. You actually only need to add a few more terms to your vocabulary to crack the code.

"Most of us know when we like a wine and when we don't, we just lack the words to describe WHY but the WHY is everything," Milne says. "The WHY is what makes your palate yours, and there is no shame in that...If we can view wine as just a language and geography game, then all we really need are a few back-pocket terms." Ahead, we break down Milne's eleven must-know wine descriptors, and even use them in a sentence, so you can successfully translate exactly what it is that you're tasting. It's time to speak confidently about wine with sophistication.

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