One. 1997 Harlan Estate. Nailed it after seeing it in the glass but before smelling or tasting. Guessed predominantly from the context of the tasting and my knowledge of the cellar of the person who provided it. A detective must use all clues available.
Three times, I believe, and I do a lot of blind tasting. It’s super fun and absolutely humbling. Two times it was wines I was very familiar with but was happy to completely nail. The third time … I can’t even remember, but I know it happened. Haha.
Agree with Tom that blind tasting is fun and absolutely humbling. Was fortunate to find a local wine group six years ago that meets weekly.
Have nailed the wine a couple times. Am happy to make a close guess, for example about 6 weeks ago the theme was Cab Sauv from anywhere. About the 5th wine in I was picking up noticeable eucalyptus and called it from Australia - and it was indeed a Cab/Shiraz blend from there. Did not get the producer or year but consider that a win.
Luck plays a role too; have you had the wine enough to remember it. Called Leonetti Cab a couple years ago but I had scored several bottles of Leonetti from a last bottle marathon months before, so I was familiar with the house style.
Always happy to be close with blind tastings. Practice does help me to make good guesses - is it a Syrah, new world or old world and approximate age - for example.
I felt pretty good about going with 2010 Leflaive Batard for the 2021 Leflaive batard at the recent Noreetuh dinner.
Love blind tasting and do it (single or double) often. Double blind tasting is the most humbling experience. I have successfully guessed the grape or blend 13 times in a row at one time, but I have never guessed the producer and year correctly. Have gotten the producer and close to the year, but never perfect. Too many wines to drink and the same wine tastes different based on when you drink it . . . I am not sure this is a skill that can be attained and Drops of God like calls seem purely fictional. But I did really enjoy the first season of that show.
The funnel method they use for things like MW tastings works, when there is a finite number of wines they can be tested on. So its not really a true “double blind”.
When the funnel ends with 2 or 3 allowed wines, its a totally different situation than me blinding @Otto_Forsberg with a Cabernet Pfeffer.
Well, a few* … but certainly more often single blind ..
*most funny situation: in a wine shop I was served a wine that “just came in and is a new release” …
I spotteted it within 10 seconds … the owner of the shop literally fell off his feet …![]()
Then I told him that I’ve visited this winery just in the morning - so it was not that difficult ![]()
None. I love blind tasting, though. I am happy when I get the grape/region and within a few years of the vintage. I am wrong way more than I am right.
Except if it’s from Virginia ![]()
The Leflaive was pretty easy I thought. Fevre was just playing the man
Once, and it was a bit of a fluke. It’s illuminating as well as humbling to do a double blind tasting and see (in my case) just how wrong I am most of the time. At the same time, I find it very easy to identify when it’s single blind or with any more info. A polar case in point: a horizontal tasting of all the great Bdx 61s which I attended in the mid 1990s. I nailed most of them by smell alone. Not bragging, that is not a great achievement, I’m pointing out that it’s so easy even I can do it.
That’s still pretty good. I’m not sure I’d manage to nail the wine blind at the winery.
The only time I’ve ever nailed a wine truly double blind was 1997 Harlan Estate, and I’d never had it before. But I’d read about a zillion notes and commentary on it and when the glass came up in a big dog tasting at Graileys the profile on the nose was so extraordinary, but also quite unique, and the nose fit the notes and commentary to a T. So I called 97 Harlan Estate on my note pad and was right.
In the somm training days I got my share. Maybe not producer…. Seattle had a pretty infamous group that tasted once a week in prep for the Adv. Somm Cert through the CMS. 6 wines, 3 white, 3 red, 25min.
Learning the deductive grid (WSET or CMS) and running wines through em will train you pretty well. Which helps for understanding wines of typicity of a region which is a good tool for making wine recommendations and building wine lists.
The nailing blinds though kinda assumes the wines chosen will be of the style for classic region. Or it requires a little Sherlock style deduction and you have to know the person that’s pouring. Know what your friends buy.
For every time I nailed a blind I also left a Chenin in the glass I called Chard.
If we are talking grape, vintage, region, plenty, especially in CMS days. If we move that to a more granular level of also calling producer and label, only a couple times where I had tasted the wine prior a few times and knew it specifically and it happened to be in a lineup.
One funny situation was where I totally nailed the wine (1998 Müller Catoir Mussbacher Eselhaut Rieslaner Auslese). I had everything right, said it out loud, and then said “nah, can’t be that” and went another direction.
I posted this about 10 years ago but it’s still a fun story.
One of my favorite blind tasting successes was at a friend’s annual blind tasting. The format is that you get 1 point each for vintage, country, region, variety, and specific wine. I was 3 points behind going into the last wine. It puzzled me for a few minutes, then it clicked, while the rest of the group was completely flummoxed, with all sorts of wild guesses being made.
When I asked the host if the wine had a Sasquatch on the label, everyone else thought I was making a joke and joining in the fun (one wag had thrown out “South Carolina carignan” as his guess), but the host looked like someone just walked over his grave. I correctly identified the wine as the 2014 Dirty and Rowdy Familiar Mourvèdre for 5 points and the win. I’ve nailed wines blind before, but getting to ask about the Sasquatch put this one solidly at the top of the list. I was fortunate to have had it a couple of weeks before at a trade tasting and it was very distinctive.
Once, after a good sniff and not even a taste. I had tasted this wine a couple of months prior and had a good memory of it. It was 2001 Charvin CdP.
Similar but not the same. In December I was at the local homebrewers club Christmas party. We were given 3 categories; beer type, brewery and beer name with about 30 names in each list. We were poured 1 beer at a time and had about 5 minutes to make our guess before the next beer was poured. That was hard enough technically having the answers in front of us so to speak. Then I’d start to overthink it trying to figure out the agenda of the person who chose the beers. I did okay overall but looking back some of it was easy, some of it was hard especially if you’d never had the respective beer before.
There’s a group of guys in San Diego that got together for decades on Friday afternoons and did Blind tastings. I had a bunch of friends in the group, but they’re all kind of grumpy
and most of them like different wines than I do. I used to head down to drink with them every once in a while and people would regularly get extremely close in identifying varietal age and where it was from often nailing the wine exactly. Of course there were lots of misses as well. I always attributed how close the guesses were to two factors. The first many years experience tasting this format every Friday. The second they all pretty much knew what the other guys had in their cellars ![]()