As I have become more experienced as a sommelier, wine judge and writer I have noticed that I look for different things in wine than I used to, or at least I focus on different things. When I graduated from the sommelier program in 2000, I was fresh from taking the tasting exam where we had to identify and describe a table full of wines, completely blind. A lot of that task involved writing extensive notes on the nose of the wine, both to get points on the exam but also to give you the clues, the "tells" that help identify the wines.
These days I find myself more interested in the wine once it is in my mouth, so I spend far less time smelling the wine, and instead think about how it feels, and (of course) how it tastes, including the aftertaste. Forget the old cliché about looking at the "legs" of a wine on the glass, how slowly the liquid slides down and how viscous the wine looks. That is a useless task, because it doesn't teach you anything. You need the wine in your mouth to determine if the viscosity comes from alcohol, sugar, oak, or the actual effect of the grape(s) used and the winemaking technique. Your mouth is far better than your eyes for this task.
