Tasting

The practice of tasting wine dates to ancient civilizations, such as those of the Greeks and the Romans, who often judged wines in contests. For modern beverage professionals, tasting is essential to running a successful wine program, providing an exceptional hospitality experience for guests, and participating in examinations, certifications, and wine competitions. Blind tasting is a valuable skill developed over many years of practice that has a range of applications—some more obvious than others.

This guide is designed for students who are working to improve their tasting skills and move from an intermediate level to a more advanced one.

Beginning students and enthusiasts of wine are often amazed to see experienced tasters “get the wine right,” as if performing a game or parlor trick. But through study and practice, anyone can develop this skill and recognize the typicity of the world’s classic and emerging styles of wines.

By using a sensory evaluation to analyze the visual, aromatic, flavor, and structural characteristics of a wine, tasters catalog clues that provide valuable information about a wine’s viticultural characteristics, climatic growing conditions, winemaking methods, age, and other factors. Putting these clues together, they use theoretical knowledge, logic, and deductive skills to identify the wine’s quality level, grape variety or blend, country of origin, region or appellation, and vintage.

The practice of blind tasting helps wine professionals develop other important skills as well.

Learning Typicity: Tasting many wines from the same category and across a range of producers, styles, and price points helps students determine what is typical for that grape variety or region. A consumer who chooses a particular wine will have expectations about what that wine should