My great virtual mentor (having never met him) Emile Peynaud assured me, and all of his readers, that the most correct term is gustatory examination, but even this is related to taste. Sensory Evaluation is probably more apt, for indeed it is most, if not all of our senses we use when "tasting" wine. For we do not stop at the five basic tastes, we push well past them into flavors, which are really best described as aromas.

In 1984 Dr. Ann C. Noble, working at the University of California, Davis, was quite possibly the first to organize the aromas most commonly found in wine into categories such as Chemical, Pungent, Oxidized, Floral, Spicy, Fruity, and more. The resulting Wine Aroma Wheel is a mainstay of wine education to this day.

Flavors are a much more complicated subject

Others have gone beyond categorizing these aromas to actually presenting them in kits so that you can experience them first hand. These can be valuable tools for learning to find the words for what you smell, but like the aroma wheel itself, they suffer from a basic potential flaw. They are limited compared to the many, many aromas we are capable of smelling, and due to the subjective nature of smells, may be limited compared to what any given individual might find in wine.

Taste is pretty absolute. Sweet, salty, sour and bitter are straightforward and we have actual sensors called the tastebuds that measure their presence. Umami is the fifth of these, and is less straightforward in as much as it was only recently discovered and is harder to describe. The umami sensor is activated by the presence of glutamates, like MSG, which due to bad PR is not often held in a good light. Suffice it to say that any number of foods activate your umami tastebud, but wine is probably not one of them.

Flavors are a much more complicated subject, depending not only on specific individual chemicals triggering your receptors, but on interaction between the chemicals. Recognition of flavor relies heavily too on memory. Our ability to recall flavors is often tied to memories surrounding the events where we first or notably experienced them. It has been suggested that this aroma link is one of the strongest bounds of our memory.

If you were to eat in a vacuum the food would have no flavor at all

For those who do not "taste" for a living, flavors seem separate from aromas. Flavors would appear to be something that we sense with our mouths as opposed to aromas for which we use our noses. Of course, it turns out that the same sensing organ is responsible for both, and both due to airborne chemicals. Aromas understandably are inhaled through the nose. Flavors too are inhaled, but through a hole in the back of the mouth, the retro nasal. This is why we run air over the wine in the "tasting" ritual.

Ever noticed how little flavor food has when you are suffering from a cold? Flavors depend on smell, and when your nose is all stuffed up, you aren't doing a lot of smelling. I suppose that if you were to eat in a vacuum the food would have no flavor at all, but that would be the least of your problems, what with imminent death and all.

Haptic is the word we use to refer to the sense of touch, and haptic sensations are part of "tasting" wine as well. There is the cotton ball dryness on our front teeth that denotes astringency. There is the tightening of the tendons in our jaws in the presence of tannins. There is temperature, and in some wines, the texture or presence of bubbles. Above all else there is a sense of viscosity and mouthfeel that many refer to as body.

Sight plays a huge roll in wine "tasting"

Glycerin is a word that is often thrown about in relation to body. Setting aside for the moment that the more correct term is glycerol as glycerin is a pharmaceutical term, it simply does not seem to be as major a factor as many would think it would be. The thickness of glycerol at room temperature is probably the source of the erroneous assumption that it is responsible for the sensation of viscosity in wine. It has been demonstrated that the amount of glycerol that needs to be added to wine to change its perception of body is far beyond what is actually found in wine. Ethyl alcohol, ethanol, the primary alcohol in wine, has been shown to be a greater source of the perception of viscosity in wine than glycerol.

For me, body goes beyond the sense of viscosity, or even the haptic sensation of mouthfeel, to a general sense of the overall "weight" of a wine. Were you to spin wine in a centrifuge to remove all of the liquid components, what you have left would be what chemists call ash, and wine people like me call "dry extract." This measurable aspect of wine is directly responsible for how "big" a wine is, or how much body we perceive.

Sight plays a huge roll in wine "tasting." The visual clues are often the most suggestive when indulging in the parlor game of guessing a wine's origin. Pinot Noir can be implied at a glance, but that same translucent red liquid is quickly transformed to Nebbiolo as soon as the tannins are perceived. Therefore visual clues can mislead as much as they can lead, which has led to the advent of black glasses to remove the pre assumption that seeing a wine can bring.

Sound has a great propensity to mislead

The aural sensation, sound, would seem to be the only sense we don't bring into play in the presence of wine, but of course we do. The chime of glasses in a toast is a way we bring sound into the fold, but the most obvious is speech itself. Most professional tastings eschew talking about wine before everyone is done evaluating it. This is simply because of the highly suggestive nature of the human mind. Were a person to mention a specific aroma while you are a experiencing a wine, it is quite likely that you too would find that same aroma in the wine. So it seems that even more than sight, sound has a great propensity to mislead while one is "tasting."

We can only taste five things, but by using all five of our senses we "taste" much more in wine. Perhaps this is why the novice wine taster so often complains of her inability to perceive the sensations of the more experienced taster. She is but "tasting" with her mouth.

References

Ann C. Noble Biography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_C._Noble

The Wine Aroma Wheel

http://winearomawheel.com

The effects of ethanol and glycerol on the body and other sensory characteristics of Riesling wines

http://www.researchgate.net/publication/227684416_The_effects_of_ethanol_and_glycerol_on_the_body_and_other_sensory_characteristics_of_Riesling_wines

Effect of ethanol, dry extract and glycerol on the viscosity of wine

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0260877406006959

Tactile, auditory and visual suggestibility

http://www.researchgate.net/publication/18498235_Tactile_auditory_and_visual_suggestibility (by request)