Guide to Tasting and Reviewing Vinegar

Lovers of beer, wine, and spirits are accustomed to somewhat standardized reviews and may even keep detailed tasting notes of their own. While specific rating systems can vary considerably, there are a few common elements that nearly every review will incorporate regardless of the beverage: Appearance, Nose, Taste, and Finish. More detailed assessments will also usually include discussion of Mouthfeel, how the libation can be utilized (think food Pairings or cocktail potential), and a general Overview of the experience.

In our opinion, there is no reason vinegar could not also benefit from a similarly consistent approach to tasting. For that reason, we have developed the following outline for our own reviews of various vinegar we try.

Acetophile Vinegar Tasting Notes Outline

Below you will find the elements we focus on when tasting and reviewing a vinegar. Details on the procedure we use can be found further down.

Appearance

What does the vinegar look like? Is it clear or cloudy? Is there sentiment visible? What sort of color does the vinegar have? Does it appear thick and syrupy with “legs” like you find in a nice wine, or is it thin and watery?

Nose

What do you pick up by smell? Is the acidity strong and burns your nostrils, or instead are you picking up sweet notes or perhaps specific fruits? Does it smell musty or clean? Do you detect any chemical notes as you inhale?

Taste

In most vinegar you will detect many of the same notes on the palate as you did in the nose, but this is not always the case. Is the fruit or other source of sugar/alcohol apparent? Can you taste any residual alcohol? Are the flavors bright or muted? There no right or wrong terms that can be applied to the subtle tastes one detects, and these are often determined by what a taster is most familiar with. One person may notice tobacco and another leather, but often these can describe similar experiences.

Mouth feel

This is often included in Taste or the next category Finish, but given the wide variety of production methods and fermentation sources, we feel it deserves its own category. Mouth feel descriptors may include syrupy, astringent, burn, thick, thin, etc.

Finish

What do you notice after you swallow? Does the taste linger or is gone quickly? Do you detect any new flavors? Do you primarily continue to taste the acetic acid or are you picking up the complementing flavors?

Pairings

This category is optional and may very depending on what you are tasting. For balsamics you may test it with a piece of bread dipped into a high quality olive oil. For lighter, fruitier offerings it may make sense to try it with seltzer water. How is it in a salad dressing? Again, no wrong way to do this, it is simply different ways to expand your assessment of a product.

Rating

Perhaps the part of a review that gets the most attention yet is is ultimately the least helpful is the rating. This is especially true when it comes to vinegar which can be exceptional in one use and completely out of place in another. Many of our reviews won’t even include a rating for these reasons. But, when we do, we will generally follow this scale:

• 95-100: An exceptional vinegar that is incredibly well balanced and unique in its offering.
• 90-95: Excellent vinegar with interesting notes and entirely without flaws.
• 85-89: A very good vinegar that you would proudly serve without hesitation.
• 80-84: A solid, well made vinegar that may lack character or one that brings unique notes but has apparent flaws.
• 75-79: Meh. Nothing special or unnecessarily harsh.
• 70-74: Obviously flawed.
• 50-69: Only recommended for cleaning.

In our experience, most people are accustomed to using vinegars they get from a super market that would fall in the 75-85 range. Some higher end shops may be able to provide vinegars in the 85-95 range. Anything over 95 is truly exceptional.

A quick side note on the scale: People often ask why have a 100 point scale if you only go down to 50 (and in practice, 70 is often the basement). The answer to that is simple: 100 is the theoretical best possible vinegar ever created and 1 is the worse possible vinegar. Thankfully no one would ever take the time to bottle things so egregious as to score below a 50. If you want to know what a sub 50 vinegar would be, browse social media posts on homemade vinegar and look at the experiments that get discarded.

Overall

If the ratings section is least important, this final section is surely the most important. This is where you pull together all of the notes from above and give a final assessment of the vinegar. In a sentence or two, summarize what one can expect from this sample.

Tasting Procedure

When conducting a formal tasting, it is helpful to be consistent. If you are going to take the time to review something, it is worth ensuring you have the time and attention to do it right. This is true of vinegar, wine, beer, spirits, etc. To be clear, not every experience with a quality libations needs to be this intentional and can in fact detract from one’s enjoyment. But here at Acetophile, if we are going to write a review, we want to do it the best we can.

We start by looking at the appearance. Ideally this is first done within the bottle to assess clarity and to see any sentiment that may be present. It is then gently shaken to ensure homogeneity, clarity may be reassessed if the vinegar has sentiment.

Next 5-10ml are poured into a small tasting glass. We prefer glasses used for whiskey such as glencairns but anything small will do. Even though we are still looking at the appearance, it is impossible to not begin assessing the nose as well. Once in the glass, we will give it a swirl paying attention to the viscosity and giving a descriptor of the color.

When evaluating the nose, it is often best to smell from a foot or two away initially so as to not overwhelm your senses. You can also waft the aromas towards your nose to get a better sense. It is easy to have the acetic acid overpower everything else thus a more cautious approach will often allow you to pick out the more subtle notes. It can be helpful to let the vinegar sit for a couple minutes smelling at various times as some of the more volatile elements can fade quickly with time.

Tasting straight vinegar isn’t something that most people are used to and admittedly there is a big difference between the enjoyment of this with a sweet well-aged balsamic and an a higher acidity fresh cider vinegar. For that reason, we encourage people to do what is comfortable to them. We will usually try the smallest sip straight to get the full effect of a vinegar, but in reality most of our notes come from tasting the vinegar watered down — often down to 50% of its original strength. You can also feel free to spit out the vinegar instead of swallowing it if you prefer.

Some vinegar tasters prefer to use a small swab to dab the vinegar into your mouth. Coming from a background of high proof spirits, this is not common practice for us, but may be a useful approach for those who find straight vinegar too intense.

In our outline we break things down into taste, finish and mouthfeel, but in reality, all of these things are being evaluated simultaneously. At first it may be hard to taste anything besides the acidity, but with practice many more notes will be prevalent. Tools such as the flavor wheels linked below can help with identifying particular notes, but in our experience just asking yourself “what does this remind me of” will often get you headed in the right direction.

For both nose and taste, we recommend you try to reset your palate while enjoying the vinegar. This can easily be done by smelling something you are familiar with such as dark chocolate, coffee beans, or even taking a moment to sniff your own shirt.

Finish is not just about how long you can taste something, but is actually a great chance to assess more subtle flavors that are often overshadowed when initially tasting. It is not uncommon for us to identify notes in the finish that were not apparent in the nose or initial taste.

At this point you should have all the information you need to write a solid review. However, since unlike wine or whiskey, vinegar is rarely enjoyed by itself, we recommend you take the time to try the vinegar in one or more applications. While we have some standard applications such as with bread and oil or with seltzer water as a simple “cocktail” the reality is that you should let the vinegar determine the best way to try a potential pairing. Maybe it is in a salad or sprinkled on rice. Like most things in this process, there is no wrong answer.

After all these steps are completed, you can write an overview and if you want, give the vinegar a rating. Our overviews try to take into account everything we discovered in the tasting but we try to focus on the main flavor notes and how we can see this being used in our own kitchen. Companies will spend hours crafting the few sentences to describe their vinegar — here you get to offer that assessment for yourself.

A quick note about sampling more than one vinegar: For in depth tastings we will rarely do more than one or two at a time so as to not burn out our palate. However, it can be helpful to do a rapid fire tasting of several vinegars either before or after your main tasting to better assess the differences that may not be obvious when tasted on their own. We will often do this and only take quick notes that we can incorporate later. If doing more than one, be sure to drink plenty of water or other neutral liquid between samples.

Additional Tasting Resources

Vinegar Specific

While we recommend being consistent in how you approach vinegar tastings, we are adamant that there is not a single method that should be considered best. Check out these other approaches and write ups on reviewing to help craft your own style and methodology:

• How to do a Vinegar Tasting – Excellent outline from Vinegar Connoisseurs International (Vinegar Man himself)
• Balsamic Tasting Process – Official grading chart and process
• An Apple Cider Vinegar Taste Taste – From The Splendid Table
• Tasting Apple Cider Vinegar – Cook’s Illustrated approach and results

While not specifically related to tasting vinegar, it is also worth while to bookmark the Supreme Vinegar Blog as it is the most comprehensive and up to date collection of vinegar related content on the web.

Tools from Other Disciplines

People often scoff at the overly detailed descriptors professional wine and spirits tasters will use in their reviews. While we agree that sometimes it can get a bit pretentious, decades of tasting has taught us identifying specific tastes and smells is a skill that can be learned. And just as a graphic designer can easily differentiate between 20 shades of green, so too can tasters learn to identify specific fruit and floral notes in what they are tasting.

A big part of learning this skill is increasing your lexicon to be able to identify what it is you are picking. We recommend some the following resources to build your vocabulary. They are not all vinegar specific, but given the common heritage of alcoholic beverages and vinegar, tools for wine and spirts are surprisingly applicable.

• Wine Aroma / Flavor Wheel – Great resource for narrowing down what you smell and taste by category
• Wine Color Chart – Does not include some of the darker colors found in vinegar, but works well for most fruit based options.
• Whiskey Tasting Wheel – From Whiskey Magazine
• Tasting Guidelines – Outline from Whiskies of the World
• Sequential Tasting Method – Documentation from WhiskeySmith

Conclusion

At the end of the day, tasting processes are designed to help you enjoy what you are trying just a little bit more. If all of this is too academic or structured for you, then by all means only adapt the parts that are most useful in your own situation. Our goal is to break down the approach we use in hopes that it will help other understand and appreciate vinegar in new ways.

If you have questions or suggestions on vinegars we should review, please reach out to us at bk@acetophile.com.