One party I had with 20 wines hidden in tasting bags. I’m a bit of a troll and have been known to put nice bottles in the line up… but also some duds.
My favorite night was when someone who doesn’t like Chardonnay called the TJ’s “2 buck chuck” the Far Niente Chardonnay. They were able to mostly get all the other wines, but this one was particularly amusing to me.
Have any of you had some EPIC blind wine calls? Whether it be spot on or… could’ve been a hilarious blunder?
Blind the wine in a dark travel mug. I had a buddy who couldn’t tell red from white.
Blind tasting is hard but very much worth doing. A few years ago had a blind tasting with a few friends with I think 5 Napa cabs from a single producer spanning 14 years. My friend and I were very familiar with these wines and his dad who was not that familiar with them was there also. We knew we had the right years for the wines and his dad was taking forever trying to figure out his choices. Obviously he called them all right and we weren’t even close, we both mixed up the 2011 with the 98!! Humbling for sure.
Yes it can be fun as long as it’s not a vehicle to embarrass people. It can after all be a very humbling experience.
Worst: Not guessing a Ch Musar Hochar Pere et fils at a walk round tasting event, a mere week after it shone in our tasting group.
Best: Guessing a 10 or 20 yo (I can’t remember which) Muscadet. I’d only ever tasted one Muscadet before, many years prior.
My two groups, and some of even the informal stuff we do, we taste blind a lot. It’s humbling and level-setting, and bias defeating if you let it. i’ve guessed some things before because there are signatures and vintages, and both blend to form a model in my mind. Yet, most of the time, I get the dose of humility I both need and enjoy.
Oh, it’s never for shaming. We have a good natured group.
100% agree on the humbling part. One of my old co-workers LOVED blinding. I think it’s fun, but sometimes it gets tiring using your brain that much on alcohol. 
My group has coined the term “Vitamin H”, as in a dose of Humility that is taken with blind tasting. We find this healthy humility quite often when we taste together.
People were mad they loved a grocery store vinho verde… but not as shocked as when we all enjoyed a James Suckling patented 90 point wine. Our group’s inside joke is that JS will give any wine 90 points if they mail him cigars.
A 92 for a box of cigars?
they have to be Cubans tho.
I saw on his Instagram he thew “non-Cubans” straight into the trash.
My wife blind challenges me all the time.
One time, just last year, she hit me with one I whiffed on. It had nothing but musty old cardboard on the nose, but not corked. Kind of thin and acidic with an astringent finish.“Blech” for the little bit of fruit that was there.
I declared, emphatically, “This is an old assed bleached out Sauvignon Blanc. Way past its drinking window. An old forgotten Mondavi “Fume Blanc” from 1978.”
It was a 2012 Martinelli zinfandel. (This is not to impune them, it was an odd bottle and it did proceed to open up.)
I was wrong on every level.
My failures are more fun to look back on than my successes! 
Another time, another wine, I guessed Snoop Dogg Cali Red and it was “The Prisoner.” I took partial credit.
lol amazing.
Greatest triumph: identifying Biondi-Santi rosé blind
Most offense caused by an erroneous call: declaring to a collector friend that his 2004 Domaine Leroy Bourgogne was a mature Oregon Pinot…
My wine group once did a US themed blind tasting and since not everybody in Europa has a huge stash of American wines at hand, two of the participants unknowingly went to the same store and bought the exact same wine to bring along. They incidently were even slotted next to one another and not a single member of the group was able to tell that the two wines were the same.
On the other hand, I once correctly guessed Welschriesling for whatever reason without any hints and also correctly put a Rosé to Monsant.
I once set up five glasses for my wife to taste blind. She doesn’t taste blind although we do often open small verticals or horizontals. She tastes them all once, takes a second taste of two of them and turns to me and says “These three taste like a blend of those two.” She was right (blended 25/75, 50/50, 75/25) and I was completely stunned. I tasted them before I gave them to her and knowing what they were I wouldn’t have picked that up.
Tbf, The Prisoner is some awful stuff.
Worst: too many to mention. I’m closer to being the worst blind taster in the world than the best.
Best: at Arpege 9-10 years ago, the sommelier blinded me on a glass of red wine and asked for my guess. The wine was dark, dense, and tannic. I immediately eliminated Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Rhone and was thinking maybe Malbec/Cahors, but that didn’t seem quite right. So I guessed Tannat, with some age and some oak. He was stunned, as was I. The wine was 1995 Montus Prestige.
…my best blind tasting experience was the time i ambushed Schildknecht in Germany,
with a Virginia-grown Horton Norton that i had brought expressly to that end…
Dave was tasting at Lingenfelder in the Pfalz, where i was spending a week
hiding out in the workers’ quarters…
i had Rainer L put the Virginia wine in one of his little tasting carafes,
and tuck it in among the Spätburgunder and the Dornfelder that we were tasting…
Schildknecht stuck his well-educated nose into the glass, raised his eyebrows,
and asked Rainer how the hell he had got eine Sondergenehmigung
(special permission) to plant Barbera…
