Hold your own winetasting at home

TiZwine.com panel taste hundreds of wines a year to choose our TOP TIPS and BEST BUYS Ever wondered how they are able to distinguish the good from the bad? It’s not a skill you learn overnight – it takes plenty of practice. But the practice is fun!
The best way to learn about wine is to drink it regularly and make sure you focus on earning something about each wine you try.  You’ll be amazed how soon you begin to identify  differences between wines.  With practice you’ll soon pick up on the subtle differences.

Home Wine Tasting events are a great way of building up your knowledge base of wine information – and they can be great fun.  They’re not difficult to set-up but they do requirea little bit of planning and preparation.  It’s important to taste the wines “blind” which means you shouldn’t see the label until after you have tasted the wine and made your notes.  Here’s how to do it:

Things you'll need:
 
• Four wines of the same variety from different wineries
OR
Four wines of different varieties from same region
• Four paper bags
• Four rubber bands
• Permanent  marker
• 16 Wine Glasses
• 4 Tasting Mats, click here to download
• 4 Note Pads
• 4 Pens

Remove the corks from the wines and place the bottles into the paper bags.

Mix the wines up so neither you nor your guests no which wines are which. Each bag should be marked with an identifier (1,2,3,4 or A,B,C,D).

Set up your wine glasses so there is 1 glass on each of the marked spots on the mat.  Pour the wine from each marked bottle into the corresponding marked glass.  So bottle 1 gets poured to glass 1, bottle 2 to glass 2 and so on.

Now its time to evaluate each wine. Start with wine one and note its colour and clarity. Do the same with the other 3 wines. Now taste each of the wines, noting its aroma, flavour and mouth-feel.  Keep your impressions to yourself until everyone has finished.

When you have finished evaluating each wine and have written your notes go back and rank the wines 1,2,3 or 4, with 1 being your favourite and for your least favoured wine.  Share your ranking with the others and discuss.

Finally, remove the paper bags and discover which wines are which.  Which was the most favoured by all? Find out from the person who brought it along, how much it cost.  It’s not uncommon for the least expensive wine to be the most favoured.

Now sit back and enjoy the wines with your friends and talk a bit more about what you learnt.  You’ll soon find that your palate is developing along with your friendships!

If you want to take the whole thing a step further then get someone to put each bottle back in a numbered paper bag, but not necessarily the same numbered bag as before. Give the glasses a wash and pour each person a little of each wine. Then get everyone to write down which wine they think is in which number bag. The unlikeliest people tend to be very good at this!