Seems to me there are two tracks. One involves developing, refining and trusting your own senses. There’s a tremendous amount of learning that can be done, no matter how experienced the taster. Black glass tastings are probably the extreme, but it also can be used to hone one’s perceptions while identifying preferences, neutral (or specific) characteristics and flaws. Guessing what a particular blind wine is matters far less than learning what one can perceive about it. Comparing impressions to others can sometimes be helpful as “obvious” characteristics may not be shared or initially recognized.
The second track is often criticized as a “parlor game”. How wonderful it would be, in theory, if a Burg-geek could always pick out the Vosne spice, or the Chambolle red fruit or the Pommard rusticity. If being right is the priority (i.e.: using every extraneous clue), than it is a parlor game. If you can allow yourself to be wrong (sometimes dreadfully so), there’s a chance to learn that a Beaujolais or Sangiovese might just taste like a Pinot, and more importantly, note which characteristics are similar/dissimilar.
Can a “true wine lover” always tell a Cab from a Merlot? For me, it’s more fun/engaging to learn what similarities might have caused me to guess wrong, than to need to guess correctly. Label/price bias and trained expectations are incredibly strong. Blind tastings can provide repeated opportunities to break free, or atleast reduce those influences.
I agree that this is well-said, and,um, blue-state anyone…?
Hey man - you got a problem with ignorance? What? Do you think everyone should go to college or something?
What a snob.
Richard - I agree with most of what you said. The idea of blind tasting for me is not to do outright identifications - that just comes with experience. You hear a piece of music enough, you recognize it. You taste a wine enough, you recognize it. I can do that with a few wines but that’s just because I’ve had them plenty of times and there’s something unique about them that somehow sticks out.
You’re entirely right in that it’s interesting to learn what it is that you can perceive about a wine or a group of wines. I’ve trashed wines that I normally love and loved wines that I’d otherwise trash. Blind tasting is also one of the main ways I decide what wines I’m going to buy. If I really love it and it’s the cheapest in the group, that’s what I’m picking up! I’ve never loved a wine in a blind tasting and then regretted having it on a later date with dinner. OTOH, I’ve often convinced myself that a wine was pretty good with my dinner and then not cared for it blind. Part of it is that I don’t know what I’m doing of course, but part of it is likely the label bias. But most of it is probably the first!
I was invited to a tasting with a few gentlemen who have a very broad knowledge base and, more importantly, whose palates I know, respect, and understand. I brought a blind ringer just for fun - a 1995 Don Melchor - and, as a collective group, they settled on 1995 Cheval Blanc.
Does that prove anything? Yes. This particular group of tasters guessed incorrectly.
However, it was without a doubt educational. The wine was parsed and examined - nice, smooth, rounded fruit… a hint of very pleasant green… maybe some well-ripened but not overripe Cab Franc… but it has to be a Bordeaux with that structure… etc… It was all in good fun. Looking back, we all knew where the wrong turn was taken to lead us to Bordeaux, and then the right bank, etc… The whole process was educational from that perspective. No pretense; no egos bruised; everyone was happy.
Everyone had fun. Everyone learned something. I think people will still rather drink Cheval Blanc over Don Melchor. Yes, indeed, the sun also rises…
Excellent points by Greg, Matt and Richard. Education is a big part of this passion for me (maybe 35% edu, 55% aesthetics, 10% getting drunk!) and I want to make sure I’m trusting my senses not the pedagogy of labels and pricetags.
Few insights from the tasting last night:
-Those with less knowledge base of the wines most likely drew less from the tasting. This is a point echoed above (I believe by Stuart) and I tend to agree. If you don’t have a point of reference, “blind” tasting 14 wines can be somewhat of an overload and not as fruitful.
Our biases play a big part in our understanding. I tried to guess at least half of the wines (even though I have never tasted at least a third of the entire set). I put a Sonoma coast Syrah as a ringer and when I came across a wine in the first flight, I thought I had ran it down. This particular wine was far more boisterous, fruit forward, extracted and oaked than anything else in the set. Clearly excellent craft and pedigree but it was anomalous. Guess what? Delas La Landonne! There was a second wine in flight #2 which had definite traces of California fruit (the sweetness/pitch) but it was also married by some lovely Rhone typicity (olive juice, meat drippings). Ends up being the Cali (Phil Bernstein nailed it btw). I wasn’t looking for the Cali characteristics in this wine because I was settled with my earlier choice as the obvious ringer. I wonder how I would have thought had the orders been reversed! I find this as a fascinating example.
Faryan,
I must recognize the fact that you correctly identified the 09 La Chapelle. I, on the other hand, thought the wine was pedestrian. I also rated the Delas La Landonne 89, thought too ripe, which is the wine I rated 99 pts when drank at home earlier this year and didn’t think over ripe. Thanks for organizing!
P.S. I agree with most of you in that double blind is not that useful.
I don’t drink a lot of N. Rhone wines, so I am certainly one of the ones who maybe got less out of the tasting from the standpoint of accumulating data points for future evaluation of N. Rhones, but that doesn’t mean it was not fun and educational for me.
Here’s the thing about blind tasting, at least for me: the theme doesn’t matter much, as long as there is one. What I drew from the tasting was gaining more experience with tasting young red wines. It didn’t really change anything that they were Syrah; we could have been doing '09 BDX or Burg, for that matter. It was still useful to learn more about oak treatments and tannins and wines made in more of an early-drinking style, for example.
Indeed, my second and third favorite wines of the night were both $30-ish Crozes-Hermitage, which, for me, meant that I was drawn to higher acid, softer fruit, less oaked, accessible wines – but probably in large part because I don’t have enough experience evaluating what some of the heavy hitters are going to develop into, so I couldn’t get through the walls of tannin.
[My WOTN was, of course, the Sonoma Coast ringer. About which I loudly exclaimed to those seated around me, "Now THIS is a typical Northern Rhone Syrah! Finally, olive and meats! ]
I enjoy blind tasting and try to bring a bottle or two every other week from my cellar to a local retailer for a quick game of “guess what’s in the bottle”. The owner will open one or two wines in addition to the ones I brought and we will taste them with the staff. Focus is on varietal identification, age, new world/old world, relative prive point. I can only do a couple at a time. Large multi bottle blind tastings require too much focus and I give up after the first five or six bottles.
As stated by many people here, there are times when blind tasting is beneficial in Single Blind aspects. You can throw away your bias and look at a range of wines from a specific region, vintage… it’s pretty informative for the here and now.
What I dislike is when people just randomly bring blind wines with no intention other than to have people guess. For all I know it can be a $5 Arkansas wine made from an obscure grape to a $1000 bottle of bordeaux but it’s pointless. It’s just a game at that point. It’s especially tiring when 90% of the time (I’m speaking in regards to one specific group of people i know) always bring some piece of shit $9 wine and keep trying to get people to say it’s worth more before unveiling it. As if the sole purpose of it is to show that they found a wine worth more than $9.
While the ability of ringers to confound tasters is interesting and telling, I never do it when I host them, because wine tastings, and particularly blind wine tastings, can be stuffy and intimidating enough, without people having to worry about being embarassed that their favorite was the Yellow Tail.
Now, if you are all experienced tasters and on equal footing, and everyone is cool with the risk of being tripped up by the ringer, then that’s great. But when I host them, it’s usually a mixture of people with different levels of experience and “geekiness,” and I care more about not stressing anyone out or making them uncomfortable than I do about whatever you would gain by including ringers.
Now, ringers of the “similar quality but not within the theme of the tasting” are different – the 82 Georges de Latour included with the 82 classified growths tasting, for example.
I can’t tell whether this thread is more about whether blind tasting is good, or what the perfect way to taste wines blind is.
To me, blind tasting of any kind is per se good because it’s a check to see whether you’re in a rut of not really paying attention to what you’re drinking.
Blind tastings are also good for “shoppers” like me, I am glad when someone does bring a less expensive wine that it turns out I really like. For example this often happens when I taste a well-balanced Australian wine blind (Jasper Hill, next to more expensive California wines, often shows as better made and better balanced to me).
But people foisting on me a glass or bagged bottle and demanding i guess what it is, or evaluate it while they wait for my verdict, is unpleasant, whether it’s something expensive or something they’re trying to prove is a bargain. I eventualy got to the point where I’d announce it was Shafer Hillside Select even if it was a white wine.
Jim and Diane Mather hosted, before they moved to the cliffs of Carmel, beautifully organized multi-flight blind tastings, three flights of six wines, where we knew the varietal and the country, and everything was fairly recent vintage so we didn’t have old next to new; Parker was kind of new to us and we all tried to bring something “good” and we had pnly a vague idea of what other people brought. I learned a lot at every tasting and they were tremndously fun socially. Once in a while some people in the business demanded complete silence about the wines while we tasted and I did not like that, but I also did not like people guessing what a certain wine was while I hadn’t even tried it yet; other than that, tremendous experiences.
More recently with California cabernet I’ve learned two things from blind tastings: Harlan 1994 always wins for my nose (less so for palate) even though I’ve never identified it; and recent Mondavi Reserve cabs are really underappreciated, beautifully balanced, deep wines.
Wow Bill - after hundreds of words on the topic you managed to put it very concisely. Good job.
Chris - maybe so. I generally taste with people who know a bit tho so more often than not there is some kind of ringer. Wrong crowd for people who are easily embarrassed.
But OTOH, liking a cheapo is not really cause for embarrassment at all. It’s wonderful to like something like Tres Picos more than a CdP costing many multiples. That’s happened in a few tastings with people from CdP and even with some MWs. If I recall correctly, they were more intrigued than embarrassed. I’m cheap so I wasn’t intrigued at all, just really happy that one of my faves was $12!
In the situation you’re suggesting, perhaps the people think there’s some right or wrong wine to prefer so it’s really the responsibility of the others to put those people at ease. But if it’s more of a social event, then no need to do blind tasting anyway. Faryan is on the money in that the more you take going in, the more you really get out of it. If I have zero idea who Schrock, Schandl, Nekowitsch, Prieler, etc., are, it doesn’t do me much good to taste a group of their wines blind. Better for me to learn about them first.
Scott - I also enjoyed the Graillot Crozes Hermitage. Fantastic showing imo and really shows what a difference in age curve between the lesser wines and the big boys. The big wines were for the most part not approachable.
Regarding the ringer, I think it did show hallmark N Rhone typicity. If anything, that is a testament to the good work being done by Andy Peay out there. Kudos to that.
Kevin, I think your experience with the La Landonne really encapsulates my original point with the thread. You are an astute taster by any measure, but I think the outlandish expression of the wine left you thinking “ringer” all the way. As you had no idea what said ringer was, the gamut of Australian Shiraz to Californian Syrah was on the table. With that set in your mind, it is no wonder that your final view on the wine may have been impacted by the outlier potential of it being a ringer and not a modern high-pedigree SV Cote Rotie. As such, I think there are so many “toss-up” characteristics in wine; for example, whether we perceive a wine as overly ripe, or simply densely packed and ageworthy can be a function of our track record with a vineyard and not necessarily our taste buds, especially at such an embryonic age.
I posted a while back about how BDX barrel tastings can be a misleading exercise because often tasters will ascribe greatness to characteristics in barrel samples simply because they are drinking legendary wines with track records of greatness. In alternative settings, we may look at these characteristics with a different lens or approach.
Great thread, Faryan. I agree with you that blind tasting really expands your understanding of wine. Creating a context - a single region, varietal, etc. - is key to getting the most out of this exercise.
I guess at this point I don’t have too much to add but I really do agree with Bill. I find blind tastings helpful because they keep me honest. I’m cognizant of the fact that labels influence me. I’m also aware that who I’m with, the setting, and my mood can greatly influence what I think of a wine. It’s easy to have a different impression tasting a wine at a winery in a beautiful setting while on vacation than when you taste it after a stressful day of work and a bad commute. Blind tastings allow you to evaluate a wine without as many preconceptions (even though I’ll admit that the setting/tone of a blind tasting can change your perception as well). All that said, I prefer to drink wine in a non-blind setting, because some of my happiest memories and experiences involve great wine with wonderful people in wonderful circumstances. But blind tasting does force me to evaluate a wine in a more technical sense and sometimes that’s good (and humbling).
No question that we want to enjoy most of our wine non-blind. Blind tasting is interesting and educational but it’s a way to learn. Mostly however, we just want to enjoy the wine. That’s why I think it’s weird to go out to dinner and write tasting notes, etc.
I completely agree with you that context matters. Your happiest memories come from certain people and situations . . .
Come out here and taste with us! Your nightmares will start!
short reply: yes, both types of tastings are a must for me. a recent theme i have been sticking to when i host dinners/tastings is to ask friends to bring a “correct” wine. a wine that has typicity and is a product of vineyard, vintage,not winemaking…
non blind tastings are like practice in the gym. complete blind tastings are the olympics. they provide different set of pleasures and rewards.
That’s what I was thinking, especially with '09 Northern Rhones. We just did a blind tasting of 18 '07 Cabs, 15 from the Santa Cruz Mountains and 3 from just outside. All but one seemed open - guess which - and a few people really didn’t like that one, so it only finished 3rd. A couple others that didn’t show so well at first, improved markedly with a couple hours air. A couple others appeared to be bad bottles, wines I’ve had each of several times before just not performing up to par, even (like magic) after they were revealed.
I do taste blind regularly. With one group we taste a lot of older wines, pop-n-pour, same variety, region and vintage. Some of those will fall apart quickly, others improve over extended time.
So, there’s a few things to keep in mind. Different bottles will show their best with different preparation. You have things like bottle variation and dumb phases to contend with. So, blind tasting is a useful exercise, but it isn’t the be-all and end-all to properly assessing a wine, the way some people contend it is.
Some wines will, at times, show what they’re about very young (maybe even just in barrel) before tightening up so much that you can’t get much of anything, and then take years to start revealing themselves again. Even non-blind, how is a snap shot at the wrong time of much use. With the tight '07 I mentioned as an example, I bet if I got a bunch of fans of the wine tasting the '06, '07 & '08, blind or not, right now they’d vote the '07 last. In 20 years I’m positive it would be voted first.
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