Color in the glass

Use daylight or a white light, never a very warm bulb, which makes everything look more orange. Put a sheet of white paper or a white tablecloth behind the glass. Fill the glass about a third and tilt it to around 45 degrees: the wine then forms a layer that runs from very thin at the rim to very deep at the center, and a single look shows all its tones.

In the tilted glass you can tell four zones apart, the same ones used in every wine palette on Pigmentoria. The rim is the edge of the wine, so thin that the tint shows: the purple of youth or the tawny of age. Tasters look at it first. The hue is the main color, the one the wine is named by. The core is the deepest, darkest part. The highlight is the lightest tone, where light passes through the wine and catches the glass.

When a Spanish taster speaks of reflejos, as in reflejos violáceos (purple glints), they mean a shade, not a zone.

Tasters order the color of red wine on a scale that moves with age. Purple: a very young wine. Ruby: bright red. Garnet: dark red with a hint of brown, typical of many crianzas and reservas. Tawny (teja in Spanish, the color of a roof tile): the orange-red of wines with years behind them, which usually appears first at the rim. Brown: very old or oxidized wines.

In Spain, picota and cereza (cherry) are also widely used for young, deeply colored reds.^[1]

A young white runs from almost colorless to lemon-green; then come lemon or straw, gold and amber, and finally brown, typical of very old wines or of oxidative ageing, such as an Oloroso from Jerez. White wines gain color with age; reds, the other way round, slowly lose it.

Rosé runs from pink to salmon and orange. Orange usually points to more time or oxygen, although some grapes, such as Garnacha, give salmon tones even when young.^{[1, 2]}

Intensity is how much color the wine has: whether you can clearly see your fingers through the glass (pale), barely see them (medium) or not at all (deep; Spanish tasters say cubierto, covered). It depends mostly on the skins, which hold almost all the color of red grapes, except in teinturier grapes, whose flesh is red too, such as Garnacha Tintorera. Thin-skinned Pinot Noir gives pale wines; thick-skinned Syrah or Monastrell, almost opaque ones.

Color is extracted mainly in the first days of maceration: making it longer adds tannin, not necessarily color.^{[3, 4]}

Color gives clues about the grape, the age and the ageing: a tawny rim usually reveals years; an intense gold in a white may point to oak or oxidative ageing; a vivid purple, to youth. But it does not measure quality: a pale wine is not worse than a dark one, only different. And it is easily fooled: warm light, a colored background or cut glass change what we see. That is why the colors on Pigmentoria are approximations: a guide for looking, not a laboratory measurement.