Tips for hosting a blind tasting

WINE TALK
21

A theme is crucial, such as 2010 russian river pinot noir between $25 - $40, for example.

22

If the point is to try and emulate the tasting seen in the movie, then a theme is the absolute last thing you want. Well, besides perhaps classic varieties from classic regions. Otherwise what is the point of blind tasting for conclusions if you already know that they are all Syrah or all Pinot Noir.

As to needing tons of stemware, I don’t see that as a necessity either. You’re blind tasting, not comparative tasting. Have the guests come with the wines bagged. Have someone else randomly number them and start in. Taste one wine at a time, everyone can throw out their conclusions and then move on to the next.

23

The point is that you aren’t biased by knowing the price, the producer, the region (if the theme isn’t a single region), what the label looks like. Sometimes, you might surprise yourself that you like a wine that you had thought you didn’t like or had heard you wouldn’t or shouldn’t like, and vice versa. Sometimes, you discover that the $20 bottle was better to you than the $50 bottle. Sometimes, you discover that you like the syrah from South Africa or Spain or Washington more than the one from the Northern Rhone, when you had always assumed the opposite.

Most of all, that when you taste blind, even if you are tasting a bunch of wines you’ve never heard of before and thus wouldn’t necessarily have any biases or preconceived notions about, I find that people tend to concentrate more on what is in the glass.

The blind tasting that does little for me, from my experience of many blind tastings, is the “any red from anywhere and anytime” one. There is no way to place wines in that kind of tasting, and you are so unmoored that it becomes difficult to form any kind of opinion. I know that seems like a contradiction from what I said earlier, but that’s been my experience, that you can liberate your mind with a medium amount of unknown, but you can shut your mind down when faced with 100% unknown.

24

+1

Ya have to serve one real joker wine … Ala two buck etc…have them score the wines if you want … one to ten or the 100 point system, but if they are not geeks the one to ten system is fine … If its more social the tasting is totally different than the Riesling shoot-outs I have put on … To make my event even more controlled I hire two servers and a MW to dispense the juice… this way I never get blamed for doing this or that to confuse people …


You may want to get the aroma wheel, this way they will have a guide for notes, if they are doing them …


Food before or after or during ??? It changes everything … I usually give the kings speech because I am so shy and then we taste NO FOOD until after …


They are fun, humbling and did I say fun…,enjoy yourself … When it’s time for the blind tasting your demeanor will be another factor, as will be light, heat …


If they are serious make it a sent free night … No bombarding of perfume or cologne it can kill the event …

Cheers !!!

PS with all this info you are getting you now are obligated to post about the event after you do it …

PSS welcome to the BB , not my regular stop,but not a bad place to land… [wow.gif]

25

Oh yea … As Sarah points out … Brown bags over the bottles … Another problem is curiosity is a mo fo … If you use some screw caps and some cork the geeks if they see the bottle opening will identify it as such transference of information invalidates the blind tasting …

26

Hey all, all the advice was super helpful, just wanted to share a couple things I learned from my first time hosting…

  1. If you have a wine cellar and your friends don’t, take your wine out a few hours earlier so it’s not so obvious which one is yours because it’s the only one at 55 degrees…

  2. We went for a mixed bag of reds and actually got a wide diversity. The bottle shapes were too much of a give away and it’s too hard to pick a WOTN with different styles. (Both of these were mentioned in the thread and I probably should have listened).

27

Eric - next time put the other wines into the freezer for about 15 minutes. Then they’ll all be the same temp and they won’t be at room temp, which is way too warm. And as you drink wine over the weeks ahead, keep a few empties that are the same size/shape. Then you can decant the give-aways into those bottles next time.

Personally, I don’t like “flights” of wine. I like everyone to have a glass for each wine, which usually means 10 or 12 glasses per person. Then each wine isn’t influenced by what you tasted just before or after, because you can taste each wine against every other wine.

As far as “themes” go, if well-chosen, that can be the most effective way to taste blind. So if you want to compare some wines from Atlas Peak with wines from Howell, or some wines from Cote Rotie with wines from Hermitage or Sonoma Coast, or Sangiovese with Nebbiolo, that’s a great way to understand the differences. Maybe they aren’t as great as you thought.

But I would NEVER suggest a price as a theme. That’s one of the most useless things to do. Have wines at $15 and wines at $550 and in between. You want to learn about label bias? That’s the way to do it. I once tasted with some MWs who professed to know plenty about France and they all preferred an inexpensive Garnacha from Spain to some high-priced CdPs. It was nice to know that they all had decent palates. They just didn’t have all that much actual knowledge.

28

I have used the following to taste five wines during dinner. Have someone bag the wines and open them. I use socks. Then label them A, B,C,D, and E. Set the table. Everyone gets a piece of paper 8.5 x 11, with the same five letters spread out on the page. Place five empty glasses on the five letters. Pour the wine. Serve dinner. Give everyone a notepad to comment on or score the wines. Enjoy the dinner and the wines slowly. This way, everyone gets to eat and drink at their own pace, in the order each person prefers, revisiting each wine as often as each person desires. This has worked well for me. No need to label the glasses. Everyone drinks at their own pace.
Phil Jones

29

We are hosting a tasting a our house this weekend and are trying to determine pour size. I say 2oz but my wife says 1oz. Here and other places I have checked online say 1.5 to 2 oz. We will have heavy hors d’oeuvres but she is concerned about people having too much to drink. Six wines at 2 oz each would be 2.4 glasses per person. With food and over the three hours people will be there, I do not think it as big of an issue. We will have 20 people which means with 1oz serving we only need one bottle of each but with 1.5 oz servings we will need two.

Part of the concern is that at other tastings with this group there have been 15-20 bottles of wine with about 30 people. Frequently it has become more about the socializing than really tasting the wine so people drink more. we want to make it about the wine. Plus, if you try to taste them all (which some people do) you could get drunk even doing 1 oz pours. We want to avoid that.

30

Well - 1 bottle for 20 people is tough - but when e.g. couples taste together it can work.
(but it doesn´t make sense to open a 2nd bottle at all … )

In my tastings I limit the tasters to 16, which is about 0.045 litre per glass, which might be something llike 1,6 oz (if I m correct) … that works fine for younger wines, while for very old bottles with heavy sediment and lower fill it´s … well - barely enough.

My point: one bottle per person is hardly too much … if consumed over a whole evening with a lot of food …

(BTW: what about spitting …?)

31

I usually plan around 1.5 persons per bottle, if it’s an evening-long kind of wine tasting that involves dinner. 8 bottles for 12 people is a good amount without people getting blasted. And with 12, you can pour 1.5 to 2 ounces per person comfortably, usually leaving enough for a couple of people to retaste. You can go up to 1 person per bottle depending on the people, the occasion, whether anyone is spitting (no civilians ever do that, and frankly, a far smaller minority of wine geeks actually do than will say on WB that they do), and whether you care or don’t care that some wine will probably be left over.

I think 1.5 ounces is a bare minimum pour, and 2 is better. Particularly for civilians, pouring 1 ounce of wine into their glass is going to elicit some weird looks. And it’s hard to get much aroma, or barely a second swallow, when it’s only 1 ounce.

32

Spitting?

Bah!

Humbug!

Spitting is for Skoal.

Wine was not invented for that and, I think, leaves an incomplete tasting impression, as well.

[stirthepothal.gif]

33

Is that a troll avatar, Anton?

34

Interesting Paul… You are saying that for a group of 20 you are actually thinking only 6 wines? If that’s true I strongly suggest you double down and get two bottles of each wine. 12 might be ok but still waaaaayyy to low for our wine group.

35

You guys have to define what you mean by “tasting”. If it’s amateurs, simply putting something in their mouths is a tasting. If it’s really about tasting and learning, then dinner and food and the rest does not need to be part of the equation. If it’s about food and wine pairing, that’s another story. If it’s primarily about socializing, then why try to impose some kind of formality on a nice evening? If it’s about sharing opinions of each wine, then there’s no need for multiple glasses. And so on.

My preference is to taste all the wines blind and not to talk about them at all until everyone has tasted and rated every wine. And I don’t want to taste them in some order, which is why we always have many glasses for every taster. And you must have a spit bucket because for those tastings it doesn’t matter that the wine is rare and costly.

I’ve spit plenty of $500/bottle wines, because I’m used to tasting with some people who are very studious and interested in studying the subject of the tasting. Someone once told me that he wasn’t interested because a tasting like that seemed too cold and clinical.

He was right and he was also really smart to bow out rather than be irritated, because some people hate those kinds of tastings, which is quite OK. And it’s also a lot of work to put those tastings together, as Gerhard said.

Therefore, it’s better not to invite some people if you’re going to have a kind of tasting that they won’t like. So again, you really have to know your crowd and then tailor the tasting to the crowd. Otherwise it is frustrating for everyone. I really don’t mind doing a tasting where I’m explaining that Syrah is not a region, it’s a grape. But I’d have very different expectations from that kind of a tasting, and I wouldn’t worry about sufficient glassware either.

BTW, I would never attempt a blind tasting with twenty or thirty people.

36

I´m not sure what you mean with Skoal (being not native English speaking),
but “incomplete tasting impression” is certainly wrong - at least for an experienced taster.

37

I guess my issue is that I want it to be more about the tasting than just drinking. And as I stated, I want 2oz pours while my wife thinks 1oz is enough. I agree 1oz is not enough. I had planned on two bottles of each but my wife thinks one is enough which makes it really tight if a couple of pours go too big. It is not a money issue since everyone is chipping in. This is about a three hour event so doing a bottle per person, or even 3/4’s of a bottle, as someone mentioned is not likely to happen, especially just with heavy hor d’oeuvres, not dinner. Maybe we are just too much of lightweights. I will probably just buy two bottles of each and handle the pours so people aren’t pouring too much.

38

I guess my issue is that I want it to be more about the tasting than just drinking.

What do your guests want/expect?

39

I think going with 2 bottles of each wine is the right play. People should be able to revisit a wine if they want. Also, I think you will get some unwelcome feedback if everyone only gets an ounce per wine for a 3 hour event.
Also, there is no harm with having some leftover wine for analysis the next day. Always fun to see how a wine develops over a loner period of time.

40

This is the real issue. I’ve hosted dozens of wine tastings for “civilians” at my house over the last decade plus, and it’s really hard to find a spot where you, as the host and the one providing all the wines (at least in my case), can get a modest amount of “wine tasting” experience going, where they are learning something about the great world of wine and you are getting some experience of seeing how they react to wines. Versus your guests, who will tend to just want to treat it like a cocktail party and will usually not be into the idea of talking about the wines, writing anything down or voting on favorites.

Frankly, my last few have pretty much failed as far as being anything more than cocktail parties with expensive cocktails, and I’m less sure about hosting these in the future. One consolation for me is that I have way too much wine, and at least it works down my oversupply a bit.

Anyway, for everyone starting out in doing things like this, it will depend mostly on who your guests are, but overall, keep your expectations pretty modest for how much wine tasting you can successfully interject into your social gathering. If you can get a little of that in there, consider it a success.