There are five basic steps in tasting wine: color, swirl, smell, taste, and savor.

A wine's color is better judged by putting it against a white background. The wine glass is put at an angle in order to see the colors. Colors can tell you the grape variety, and whether the wine was aged in wood.

Wine is swirled to allow more oxygen into the wine, which releases the esters, ethers, and aldehydes which combined with the oxygen create a wine's bouquet. Swirling aerates the wine and releases its aroma and bouquet.

A wine's quality can be judged by its taste and bouquet. The bouquet is the total smell of the wine. The flavor of foods is first experienced by the nose through the olfactory epithelium, which is a "tiny hinge-like apparatus" where "aromatic molecules are caught and interpreted by approximately 15 million receptors." The aroma of the wine, which is the smell of the grapes, reveals a lot about its flavor before actually tasting it. The wine's nose, term used to describe the bouquet and aroma, are further released by constantly swirling the wine in the glass which exposes the wine to more air making it release more aromatics. Smells also helps to determine whether the wine is faulty.

The next step is the mouth-feel of the wine. Although the surface area of the mouth has little sensitivity to flavors, it does react to acid and sugar together. The tip of the tongue tells how sweet a wine is and the upper edges tell its acidity. Wine's aromatics are further released when exposed to the temperatures inside the mouth and the scent is received by the interior pathway which also delivers data to the olfactory epithelium. Since there are taste buds all over the mouth, wine tasters tend to leave the wine in their mouths for a few seconds in order to better taste the wine.

Thus, the tasting process is a combination of the aroma of the wine, perceived by the nose, and the way its mouth-feel. Thus savor, is the total experience of tasting the wine and capturing its characteristics.