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Remembering My First Attempt at a Blind Wine Tasting
COVID-19. That word elicits an entire gamut of reactions – from sorrow, fear, panic, to annoyance, anger, and even indifference and eyerolling mockery. I think all of those were certainly warranted at various times, of course depending on our opinions of the whole situation and who we were trusting as a reliable news source. Regardless, it’s a word and a reality we all hope never to have to visit again. But it did force us to be creative and adaptive, I’ll give it that.
The COVID-19 pandemic presented humanity with the unique situation of having to learn how to deal with our unmet needs and wants in an environment devoid of 98% of our social norms and interactions. For me, I made do for a while – I pride myself on being able to suffer a great deal of monotony, thanks to past jobs and present parenthood. But after months of tedious isolation from the lockdowns, I was bursting at the seams for social interaction and, namely, festivity. A party. Specifically, a blind wine tasting party, where several wines would be visually sized up and sipped without any knowledge as to the wine’s identity. Within my bubble, obvi. So I roped my husband and in-laws into it (they were happy to have an excuse for a party at that point, too) and made it happen.
Because I wanted to participate, too, the wines needed to be kept a complete mystery, even to me, the party organizer. So I called my local Total Wine & More store, and explained I needed to make a secret purchase. I told them I was looking for four bottles of red wine, each a different single variety (like Merlot or Pinot Noir), each from a different region. When the store associate asked me over the phone what my budget was, I told her $60, under the assumption she meant my total budget for the purchase. She was happy to make the order happen. The store even bagged each bottle and boxed it up securely so I would have no idea as to the contents. I even handed my debit card to the cashier and she rang me up without a word and then I shoved the receipt elsewhere.
The tasting was a lot of fun. The four of us enjoy great wine, and whatever our Total Wine person had picked out was indeed great. Maybe a little too great for an approximate price of $15/bottle, but I was going to wait until the end to find out. I put together elaborate tasting sheets fit for professional sommeliers. I even stuck the bottles in red velvet drawstring wine bags like door prizes at a bordello. Clearly, I take my wine tastings damn seriously. 😉
My kind of game night: guessing grapes! 🙂
We tasted all four wines and attempted to guess the grape variety and country of origin for each one. Just those two things alone were hard enough! We talked through all the characteristics and traits of each wine, creating our own quartet of sniffing, swirling, slurping, and sipping (spitting has no place in a pandemic), and volleyed around our best guesses as to why this one tasted European or that one might be a Syrah, etc. It was a lot of fun for me to practice what I had been learning the last few months with my online wine course and readings. We wrote down our best guesses on our worksheets, and then finally unveiled the wines.
It was educational to compare what we experienced with the revealed wines. I did not guess anything correctly, and I don’t think anyone else did either, unless it was one part of the answer like the grape or the country. Tasting wine blind is like taking a test: it’s your best educated guess, based on what you know in that moment from the facts at hand interpreted through your own experience. But that was without a doubt the most fun test to ever fail.
It was also highly educational (ahem) when I finally uncrumpled my receipt and realized, to my astonishment, that Total Wine had interpreted my $60 budget not as the total for the order, but the average price of each individual bottle of wine! No wonder they were all so good! 🙂
I cannot find where or if I wrote down the exact names of the wines, but I did write down the general categories and one producer.
Just for fun, here are the wines we had. The majority were superbly delicious:
1) Brunello di Montalcino (Sangiovese from Italy)
2) Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon (California)
3) Rhône Syrah (France)
4) 2010 Betz Family Winery Yakima Valley Syrah (Washington) (This one, sadly, was a little past its prime, and the cork crumbled on us)
Lesson learned: if I attempt a blind tasting this way in the future, I will be extremely clear on price with my salesperson. But since it’s not every day I get to drink outstanding wines like these, I decided it was well worth it. And especially during an awful time like the pandemic, it was all the more reason to indulge.
The Rambling Vine 