I love tasting wine blind and I am never embarrassed (well, rarely) when I don't pick the perceived 'winner' of the bunch. The first flight of six wines, all whites, we were told were Chardonnays from Napa and neighbouring Sonoma - except for the fact that one turned out to be a Sauvignon blanc. Oh, and one was a Chablis, oops! With the second flight, reds, our instructor declined to offer up a varietal, or whether or not the wines were in fact a single varietal, (he said we wouldn't believe him anyway, which I think was true). The wines turned out to be all Cabernet sauvignons - except for the Rioja that was thrown in for poops and giggles.
The instructor's point was that each person in the class knew more about wine than the average wine consumer and if we couldn't identify the mystery varietals then how would the non-wine industry person, when faced with the choice of hundreds of wines in a retail shop, choose a wine to have with dinner. I got the point.
3 comments:
simple folk like me pick the one with the pretty label...easy peasy.
VG: Do I deduce that the class failed to notice the SB or the Chablis? Did you make any judgments concerning the CSs, and did you pick-out the Tempranillo? Very curious!
Thud: I'm pretty simple myself, surely you can attest to that.
NHW: Yes, no and no. Totally ignored the SB and thought the Tempranillo might be an extremely bad Pinot noir. What can I say? Tatsing/identifying wine can be difficult - and that was the point of the tasting. Humbling.
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