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Blind wine tasting: The great practice that brings us back down to planet earth

20/10/2016 Special moments

It is an art, an exercise in sincerity, of stripping a wine down and creating a coherent opinion on what’s in front of you. It is a perfect tool to develop, for professionals as well as amateurs.

“A Set of 9” by Alexa Clark (CC BY-NC 2.0)

For sommeliers, it is a brilliant test of their knowledge, since they have to draw on everything they have studied. They consider where the wines come from by the colour, the different aromas and the different tastes, and they defend their opinions by ruling out grapes and production areas that couldn’t be the wine in front of them for the climate and the soil. They more they travel, the more they learn and the more they taste. They start to recognise how each wine-maker produces wine in each area and then they narrow down their choices until they arrive at the desired producer and vintage. There are fantastic professional sommeliers who can guess correctly. And it isn’t luck, it takes years of dedication and study.

For wine-producers, it’s a good tool to see how their wine is situated in the market and among the competition, carrying out blind tastings with wines from the same area or comparing them with their favourite wines to see differences and similarities.

For amateurs, it is a perfect way to play and learn. Of course, you should have some basic ideas and have tried a number of wines before attending a blind wine tasting. To start, the best thing to do is join a group with more or less the same knowledge level and begin with topics: areas, varieties, then more. Improving is quite easy, since you find yourself without any external influence and you have to focus on the small details. The learning level is excellent.

The only thing you need to do is organise a meeting and ask each person in the group to bring a wine related to the topic that you have decided on: Garnachas de España, for example. Keep going until you get to a point where you dare to approach them all, and you can start carrying out blind wine tastings with every type of wine: the Essential Spanish Wines III pack, for example.

We don’t suggest using certain types of wines:

Firstly: Don’t bring wines that you have had in your fridge for a long time. They can be disappointing. Drink them, enjoy them and remember fondly the wine you carefully bought somewhere in a store on holiday.

And secondly: No myths, please! They could be destroyed in a second. Don’t put the wine that you’ve read a lot about and only managed to buy once in your lifetime into a blind wine tasting. It is much better to taste it fully exposed.

That’s it. Enjoy. It’s a fantastic game.

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