The importance of blind wine tasting

It’s difficult to grasp how difficult wine tasting can be until you begin to practice it.
Blind tasting is when you taste a wine without knowing anything about it and try to detect what it is from the clues the wine offers in its color, aroma and taste. Every wine has specific characteristics, and the better you are at identifying those characteristics, the better you’ll be at blind tasting.
It’s easy to describe a wine when you know what it is. When you read the back of the label and it says the wine is full-bodied and has notes of cherries and licorice, the odds are that’s what you’re going to taste.
Wine tasting is incredibly suggestive. In wine-tasting groups, when one person suggests that a wine smells like fennel, everyone starts noticing it.
When you read a wine book that says pinot noir is usually light-bodied and will smell like baked cherries, earth, mushrooms and cigar boxes, the next time you taste a pinot noir, you will look for those scents and probably find them, regardless of whether they are actually there.
Blind tasting will test the things you have read, and it will hone your skills as well as identify what kind of wines you truly like. When I blind taste, I go to a wine bar and ask the server to pour me a taste of any wine on the menu without telling me what it is. Then by examining the color, smell and taste, I try to narrow down what varietal it is and what region it came from. Oftentimes, I get part of it right, and sometimes I am dead on or way off — but I always learn something.
Blind tasting will teach your palate and your olfactory senses the true characteristics of different varietals far better than any book or label. Like anything else, competition and practice is the best way to improve your skills. I encourage you to try some blind tasting — and remember, it’s OK to get it wrong. It’s even OK to get it wrong a lot more than you get it right.
On another note, I will be taking a leave from writing this wine column until March as I travel throughout Southeast Asia in January and February. Here’s hoping I will bring back some news about wine culture in the Asian world. Wish me luck!
Austin Twohig is a certified sommelier and partner in The Santa Cruz Experience, which conducts winery tours in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Contact him at

au****@th********************.com











.