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How to conduct your own wine tasting For the past several years we have been doing wine tastings with friends, and we (modestly) think we ahve a great system. Since other friends have asked, here is the system we use. The goal of this is A) have fun, and B) learn something about wines. This first system I'm going to describe is designed to learn how to identify characteristic flavors in various grapes and regions. Decide on a grape or a region. An example might be Cabernet Sauvignon from California, or Australian Shiraz. Ask 3 or 4 couples (a total of 6 to 10 people) to each bring a bottle of wine that fits your region and within a certain price range. We often say wines for less than $20, but in some cases you might want to go higher. Remember that it is easy to buy a good wine for a lot of money, and it is thrilling to find a good wine for an inexpensive price. Each guest arrives at your door, wine in hand. You greet your guests, and take the bottle ito a side room where you wrap the bottle in newsprint. Nothing elegant, just enough to disguise the label. In some cases you might want to also remove the foil at the top. Take a piece of colored yarn and tie a loop of yarn around the top of the bottle. Repeat this with each wine as your guests arrive. Sometimes it is impossible to truely disguise the wine - there may be a unique screw cap, or some embossing, or some other feature. Don't worry. You're not trying to make this a game of guess the bottle. The purpose of wrapping the bottle is to remove some of the clever cues those marketing types use to make us want a label. In your living room, or at a large table, set out enough stemware to cover each of the wines you will be tasting. So, 5 couples bring 5 bottles, you need 10 people times 5 glasses equals 50 total stems. It's a lot of glass. We buy wineglasses at places like TJ Maxx and other discount places. It's not critical, but you should have the glasses be of a similar style, with a bowl or tulip shape (typical red wine glasses). While we're on the subject of glasses, be sure to wash and rinse them well and use a detergent that doesn't have a scent. It seems silly, but we've had experiences where the residual detergent masks the taste of the wine. For each guest, wrap a piece of the colored yarn around each stem. Nothing fancy, you just need to have a way to tell which wine is in which glass. I've tried colored dots, and they work, but the yarn is simple. Don't tie it too tight, because you'll want to reuse them in future tastings. You can engage early arrivals with this task. A lot has been written about food and wine, and how cheese masks the flavor of wine. In my humble opinion you need something light and innocous to eat while tasting wine. Maybe get some wine tasting crackers, which look like expensive oyster crackers. Also put glasses of still water out for people to drink. Before you begin the tasting, while your guests are milling about waiting to have a fabulous time, you need to give them something ELSE to drink. That first sip of an alcoholic beverage has a slightly unpleasant taste, and you want them ready to taste the wine when you are ready. So serve something else, not very much, but a little glass of some other wine. Sparkling wine serves admirably. I use three props in my wine tastings. One is a wine score sheet, and the other is the wine aroma wheel. The wine score sheet is kind of misleading. These were designed for competitions, where experts judged how well a wine compared to some sort of Platonic ideal. Since we don't really care so much exactly what hues and color density a wine may have, it's not an appropriate tool for our purposes. But, I like it because it helps us notice more things about the wine. It's OK to say "I like it" or I"I don't like it" but with the score sheet you are forced to try to qualify what you are experiencing. It can be frustrating, but since this is all (or mostly) for fun don't sweat it too much. I developed my score sheet by googling others and then modifying the questions over time. Feel free to use it and modify it, and if you think you've figured out a great way to change it please let me know. You can find my score sheet here. My second prop is the Wine aroma wheel, created by Ann Noble at UC Davis and is sold here. It sells for about $7 and is a hugely valuable way to begin to identify flavors and smells. I bought, or rather my wife bought some for us, and we use them all the time. There are two basic wheels, one for still wines, red and white, and one for sparkling wine. Using these can lead to some hilarity - or maybe its the wine. There are lots of smells some likely and some highly, hopefully improbable. Smelly dog hair? It's there. But after using this it helps you better idinetifu and describe what you are tasting. My third prop is a reference book. I like The Wine Bible by Karen MacNeil. it serves as an encyclopedic source of information about wines, regions, grapes, and whatever lse you can think of. We gave this book to our guests for Christmas one year. This leads to a critical point. You will begin sounding like a pretentious wine snob. My friends and I hate this. So, and this is the critical thing, you as host must insure that there is a base level of trust in the room. Without that trust someones feelings will get hurt and you won't have a good time. My wife is adamant about only tasting with a particular group of good friends, where everyone knows everyone well and we are able to trust each other. Some of you in the group will have different tastes than others, that is what makes life interesting. But everyone has to trust that when one of you says it tastes like cabbage and the rest think it tastes like citrus, well, trust that that person is saying the truth. Don't belittle, denie, or be mean. OK, you are ready. The glasses all have festive yarn flags flying, the guests are ready, the sheets (don't forget to buy a box of pens) are ready. Choose a bottle, open it, and pour a SMALL AMOUNT, maybe 1.5 to 2 ounces, in each glass. I like each person to have enough for several sips, but there should be enough for them to save some for comparison, and after all you have all those glasses. Follow the score sheet, with each person filling out her or his own sheet as you go. You are looking for a discussion ("Just what are those legs, anyway, and why do we care?"). As each person works down the sheet, you can open the second bottle. and so forth. Because we learned to drink wine Italy, where it is anathema to drink without having something to eat, and because food can make the wine taste differently, we sometimes will have a potluck meal with the tasting. In that case we pour and taste (and score) all wines, reserving half of the remaining wine in each bottle. We break, get dinner going and served, and then pour the wines again while eating. By this point everyone has been going for a while so things become much more loose. Don't worry about it. After dinner is over, and the wine sheets all completed, take the wrapped bottles and remove the paper. Somone should take notes about the conversation. As each bottle is revealed, the people who bought it can say how much they paid, what the wine merchant said, and what each person thought about it. I usually make people tell me the "final" score for each wine, totaled at the bottom. This is where you may find a wine that everyone liked that was less expensive than all the others. This system will teach participants about the flavor characteristics of the wines the have chosen. Maybe everybody brought crappy wines, but that rarely is the case. Usually you get a sampling of different nuances, the styles of different winemakers, and some preferences between them. Another way to do this is to ask guest to bring (or you can buy and get reimbursed) wines that a favorite winre reviewer has picked. There are lots of good wine review sites out there. I've often wanted to buy and taste 3 wines of different ratings and see if I could see what the reviewer was tasting. If you did this type of wine tasting theoretically you could learn what makes a 90 point wine vs a 95 point wine. Just remember to be thoughtful and have fun. Over the course of an evening quite a bit of wine can get drunk. As host you have the responsibility of insuring that your guests don't drive home drunk or at all impared. This is supposed to be fun, not end in tragedy. Save washing the glasses for the next day, don't sweat any spills or broken stemware, and have fun! Written (finally!) at the prompting of my old friend Tim September 24, 2008 Dave Mention, All rights reserved. |
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