If You Have the Guts
How to Taste Wine & the Value of Temporary Disorientation
If I have a good palate for wine at all (I do), it’s because Kristof has frequently come home, over the years, with tiny, unmarked sample bottles of wine, and said, “What do you think of this?” When he does, I turn off the music or podcast I’m listening to, stop what I’m doing, set down the mail, phone, or dish of dog food, dial down my sauce to a simmer. I pay attention. From experience, the wine in the bottle (or bottles) might be bulk wine or a sample of the reserve blend he’s working on. Have I made mistakes! Not paying attention causes both pain and embarrassment.
When I get very quiet and say to myself, “What do I taste?” my palate never fails me. But professional wine critics and buyers taste wine in the company of winery owners or in-office with tasting sheets that detail the producer, winemaker, region and price. They know the distributor and PR firm. How can they taste with all that background noise? Perhaps they possess wine tasting denoise.
Most nights, we pour our house wine into unfancy stemless glasses. We’re happy that way. When Kristof brings home a lineup of trials, test tubes comprised of different blends, we rinse our glasses in filtered water first, then a tiny amount of neutral wine; the water in Napa stinks of bleach and pond scum.
Sometimes we hold blind tastings, mixing our own Sauvignon Blanc, say, in a lineup of other Napa Sauvignon Blancs. We once bought professional blind tasting “wine socks” in a small production wine shop in Beaune. Their snug fit perfectly obscures the bottle and absorbs any moisture from condensation. When we couldn’t find them in America, Kristof substituted a selection of knee socks, printed with cheeseburgers, dinosaurs, UFOs, and cacti, the feet cut off. That works, too.
Blind tasting with your own wine messes with you a bit. You’re confident, but the stakes are high. It’s like going to Back-to-School Night and sweating until you finally spot your child’s art on the bulletin board. Ah, I’d know it anywhere, you think.
Not seeing the bottle label is a start. Kristof says he’s done the infamous UC Davis “color test,” a blind tasting of mixed red and white wines—all the same temperature—served in black glasses, and it’s terrifying. Sometimes you can’t tell the difference between red and white, at least at first. You’ve temporarily lost norms of orientation.
Why do I think this is important? We live in a time when we are deluged with information and so we subsist on pre-digested forms of information. We think we have to. We have stopped the habit of quieting down and listening to our own senses and insights.
What if I gave you a quote by a politician or public person, but didn’t tell you who said it? Then I asked what you thought? The stakes are high, if you agree with a person across the aisle, so you’d probably protest lack of context. And feel a rush of relief when I finally told you the source.
Tasting wine, really tasting it, demands stillness, the stopping of time, and going inward. Also confidence. It demands and integrates intellectual and sensory intelligence. It’s a different spin on the idea, in vino veritas. You can buy black tasting glasses on Amazon.