In culinary school I ran a wine club called “Uncorked!” (I know, so damn clever, right?) I had some pretty good wine teachers, too, so I already knew a fair bit about wine when I walked into Brian Freedman’s class and practicum on wine tasting. I was very pleasantly surprised, though, by the river of truly useful, well-framed information and advice he offered. Many people are passionate and knowledgeable about wine, but Freedman sets himself apart by being an engaging speaker and a skilled teacher, too. (His Master’s Degree in Education probably helps, too.) Plenty of sommeliers and wine geeks can direct you to a few choice bottles, but an enthusiastic educator like Freedman is a much more rare, and more helpful, kind of person to find. If I were to give him a mantra, I’d recycle that old cliché about fish and fishing: “Tell a man what bottle to buy and he’ll have a good drink; teach him how to understand wine and he’ll drink well all his life.”

It would be impossible in this limited space to bottle up and label everything Freedman had to share, so let me just pour us a few glasses of the more significant lessons of the day.

First, figuring out wine requires two things: wine knowledge and wine-tasting technique. Knowledge, you can get from reading and talking to people—information on how wine is made, grape varietal characteristics, the effects of geography, climate and culture, how temperature affects flavor, that sort of thing. Tasting technique is more hands-on—it’s about honing your senses to be able to sort through subtle wine characteristics like color, aroma, taste, body and finish. Just as you have to sharpen your knives to break down birds and beasts for the pan, you have to sharpen your knowledge and senses in order to properly deconstruct the wine in the glass in front of you. Just as with cooking, it takes a lot of practice to get good at it.

Early in the session Freedman offered this surprising comment: “Wine is often drunk at the wrong temperature. Reds too warm, whites too cold.” Turns out, this isn’t mere snobbery, or the wine geek’s precious quibbling over a few degrees—it’s actually important if you want a wine to show you its true flavors. Too warm and the alcohol comes forward too much and the fruit can taste “stewed” or the wine seem “flabby”; too cold and the wine can’t release its subtle aromas. (This is also why ads for mass-market American beers are all about snow-capped mountains and icy streams; super-chilling disguises their lack of interesting flavor.) Freedman had us temperature-abuse a couple of wines to prove his point, over-warming a charming Burgundy to drive away its bright fruit, and over-chilling a flowery Torrontés to crush its delightful floral aromas. All of this is simply a matter of chemistry, physics, and physiology, and given the hundreds of aroma compounds in wine it’s probably even more complicated than you’d think. The point is, if your red’s too warm, ask for an ice bucket to adjust it; if your white’s straight-from-the-cooler frigid, leave it on the table to loosen up. (Don’t ask for an ice cube, though—that’s just wrong.)

Speaking of abuse, early in his talk Freedman intentionally poured us a wine that was really bad—an over-oaked California chardonnay with nothing to offer but cloying, heavy-handed vanilla notes and a short, nasty, depressing finish. It reminded me of the “Crap Wine Project” I did a few years back, going out of my way to taste as many garbage and “corked” wines as I could find. Knowing what’s bad helps you recognize what’s good.

This over-oaked catastrophe segued nicely into a discussion about the proper use of oak, one of the most important (or infamous) methods for flavoring wine. You could probably write an entire book about oak in winemaking: the buttery, vanilla-y, caramel-y flavors it can give, its oxygenating properties, French vs. American oak, new oak vs. used oak, the degree of “toast” on the barrel staves, and so on. Suffice it to say that oak is most properly used to “season, frame, and occasionally amplify” a wine’s flavors, like salt on a steak. Freedman puts it like this: “You’d be mad if your steak came so over-seasoned that it tasted like nothing but salt and pepper. You want to taste the steak, and proper seasoning helps you do that.” You’d feel the same way about a wine with all its potential flavors blasted away by the heavy-handed use of oak.

The first thing to do when tasting wine, after checking the color, is to swirl the wine in the glass to loosen the aromas, just as you might stretch your muscles before running a marathon. Most of wine’s flavor comes from aromas. (If you don’t believe it, taste with your nose pinched. You’ll get the acidity, tannin, and sweetness, but little else.) Swirl, and then stick your nose right in the glass. What do you smell? What does it remind you of? Do it a few times. This is the heart of wine tasting, the part where you get to murmur speculatively about “notes of this” and “hints of that”—green apple, currant, red berries, bell pepper, brown spices, black pepper, vanilla, butter, leather, pencil shavings, mushrooms, earth, wet sidewalk, cat piss, whatever. (The UC Davis wine aroma wheel lists over 100 of these helpful aroma descriptors to help you get started.) Aroma is highly subjective of course, so you can even just make stuff up, if that helps you get your description flowing (“Anyone get ‘mossy tombstone’? ‘Snickers bar’? No…?”). “And if you can’t quite pin it down,” says Freedman, “simply identify the general aromatic categories: floral, fruity, earthy, vegetal, spicy, chemical, and so on.” This last point is welcome advice, because I often can recognize something general, but can’t name it specifically. (And by the way, how is anyone in this country supposed to know what red or black currants actually smell like? Can you even buy them here? This is something I’ve always wondered, even while I’m saying stuff like, “Yeah, right, definitely notes of black currant… and cocoa… and, um, mossy tombstone….”)

One of the most interesting aroma profiles, by the way, is the fragile, vulnerable earthiness you get in elderly red wines that have matured and will soon turn to contemplate their inevitable vinegary demise. Freedman refers to this, quoting a book he once read, as “the sweet funk of death.” We didn’t try one of those (they’re expensive), but I did taste one once, and I remember it changing, fading, with every sip as it warmed and aerated and let the last wisps of its aromatic soul slip away into final oblivion. (Hmm, I think I feel a haiku coming on….)

But let’s return from the grave, shall we, to talk more brightly about slurping and swishing. “Flutter a sip over your tongue with some air,” advised Freedman, “but keep it away from those flavor-diluting salivary glands underneath. (And try not to choke, either.)” Slurping your wine brings the aromas in your nose together with the sour, sweet and bitter tastes on your tongue, putting everything into balance and throwing the wine’s full flavor into hi-definition. Aroma + Taste = Flavor.

The backdrop for flavor, by the way, is its “body,” meaning the sense of viscosity and texture resulting from factors like alcohol content, residual sugar, oak and tannin. To help us understand body, Freedman had us pinch our noses while swishing the wine around in our mouths. “What does it ‘feel’ like?” He helpfully suggested that we compare the texture to something familiar, like milk: Is it like skim? 2%? Whole? Half-n-half? “The nose pinching,” he added hastily, “is just a teaching tool—don’t do it at a wine tasting or you’ll look pretty foolish.”

Finally, the swallowing! Welcome to wine-tasting’s final treat—the lingering flavors called the “finish.” A delicious and interesting finish means the wine is both well built and substantive. Interestingly, one of the best finishes of the day came from a tawny port, which smelled like nothing more than sweet fruit, but which sat deliciously in the mouth for well over a minute after swallowing.

Oh, one caution about swallowing. You know how your judgment goes out the window when you’ve had too many drinks at a party? The same applies (and faster than you’d expect) when you swallow every mouthful at a wine tasting. You need your judgment intact if you’re claiming to “taste” wine, so you’ll have to spit most of it out. Don’t worry, you’ll still get the finish, from the little bit that manages to stay coating the inside of your mouth. Just a word to the wise!

All of this is just a fraction of the material Freedman packed into his brief two hours, and there were at least half a dozen other topics equally worthy of review here, if only space allowed. The upshot, though, is that I think everyone came away with some pretty good tools and information to begin exploring the pleasures of a life with wine. Thank you, Wine Sensei!