Together with the smell is the main taste in the art of tasting wine. The receiving organs are located in the tongue. The rest of the mouth is almost
Unsensitive to any kind of taste althoug it perceives the tactile sensations and the thermic ones, we will talk about them later.

The tongue is after all, fairly crude, only able to distinguish four basic sentations: sweet, sour, salt and bitter. Inside the tongue these sensations are only perceived in points called taste buds that are distributed all around the tongue in an irregular way. Each papilla has hundreds of tasting buds and because of that ,us, human beings we possess hundreds of tasting cells.
Each of this existing flavours is felt in a different part of the tongue. The sweet taste is felt on the tongue tip, the acid on the sides, under the tongue,

The bitter and sour tastes at the rear part of the tongue. This distribution is important for the art of tasting and in fact it determinates the way in which  Wine tasters will enjoy the wine. As it happened with the smell not all the substances have a smell. In order to have it, they have to be soluble in the saliva and they have to be present in a sufficient quentity to be appreciated and perceived.

The most important quality of a wine  is its balance between swetness and acidity. To get the full taste of a wine the following steps should be followed:

• Initial taste, in which you take the wine to your mouth and three different parts are observed: attack, evolution and final impression. The first part or attack lasts two to three seconds and the sweet tastes are the prevailing ones.
• The second part also called passing through the mouth, lasts about 5 to twelve seconds, and in it, one can appreciate the acid, salty and sour tastes.
• The last part is that of the final impression. It lasts 5 seconds or a bit more. The tastes prevailing are the acid and sour ones.

Nevertheless the tasting of a wine doesn?t finish when you swallow it or when you spit it. The taste remains in the mouth, in the nostrils and in the pharyns. Everything is impregnated by the tasted wine and its vapours. As a result the senses of taste and smell are impressed for a while.  This last sensation we call it aftertaste. Its persistance and lasting depends on many factors.

Depending on how long this aftertaste lasts, we talk about short or long wines in the mouth. The persistence is measured in “caudalias” (each one corresponds with a second of persistence).

But we cannot trust it because of its subjectivity. The wine contains substances included in the four already named flavours, but it?s necessary that the wine taster can appreciate them to be able to distinguish them. In order to do that he must train his/her taste.