Blind Tasting Part 1: A Treatise on Texture

Disclaimer: This is a pretty long read, and the best way to go through it is undoubtedly with a glass of wine in your hand (even if you already know what it is) so that you can go through the process step by step with this post as a reference!

Background

Blind tasting wine is a fun and challenging way to put your tasting skills to the test. You have to rely solely on your ability to tie your sensory experiences with your knowledge of viticulture, geography, and the winemaking process to evaluate the wine and try to guess what it is.

Trying something new for the first time can be uncomfortable, and if I’m being completely honest, blinding wines at first can make you feel like a tool. If you’re doing it for yourself, and not to impress others, it’s easy to get over that and realize that it is an excellent learning exercise, and a fun way to truly see a wine for what it is without getting caught up in the pretense that comes with labels and producers.

Blind tasting is really just a process of elimination. Given what you know about certain grapes and regions, you can cross off a lot of varieties with only a few observations. While some wines are easier to guess than others, what’s more important than calling correctly is having justification for your call. Sometimes you get to the end of your process and you can’t determine between two or more very valid possibilities. Sometimes you’re tasting a grape you’ve never even heard of, though it’s most instructive when you’re tasting a core set of varieties within certain standards (this is how the actual sommelier certification works). A good guess means you did your job well, and you’ve reached the point of data collection. So just give your final answer, learn from the experience, and enjoy the wine!

With all that said, here's how to get started with blind tasting:

Step 1: Observe the wine visually

Before you smell or taste the wine, take a moment to observe it. Take note of its color, opacity, and viscosity as you swirl it in the glass. This can give you clues about the grape, like the thickness of its skin, or a window into the vinification process. If the wine is dark and inky, for example, you can already narrow your list down considerably.

In this case, you’re probably looking at one of a few major thick-skinned grapes. The opposite could be true if the wine is so translucent that you could read through it.

You can also get a sense of the age of the wine, as sediment consolidates and sinks to the bottom of the bottle over time, giving the wine a more translucent fade, and a warm glow.

Step 2: Smell

Give the wine a good swirl and sniff. This is where glassware can make a big difference. Check out Gianpaolo’s post on the Nebbiolo Stemware Conundrum, and if you’re interested in a one-size-fits-all glass, consider adding a six-pack of Gabriel Glas all-purpose stemware to your next order! Take note of the aromas you detect, including any fruit, floral, or earthy scents. Do these impressions cohere with what you saw in step one? The options will continue to narrow.

Don’t worry too much about individual notes like roses, raspberries, or tarragon at first. More broadly, does this wine smell more like a bouquet of flowers than a bowl of fruit? A bag of herbs? Paint thinner? All of these things will let you cross off more possibilities, and with experience will start sending signals about which grape or grapes you might actually have in your glass.

Step 3: Taste

This is the fun part, which makes it easy to speed through this step. Most people I talk to identify retention as the thing that holds them back from feeling like they know wine. I have found it difficult to learn when I taste without intention.

That said, most of us are enjoying a glass of wine after a long day at work, or out at dinner, and it can be hard to take the time and focus on what’s in the glass. So we have a system that hopefully makes it a little easier, and a little more fun.

The way we see it, there are two main elements of wine: texture, and flavor.

The reality is that most of us don’t have a sufficiently sensitive palate to pick up on the subtleties of a wine’s flavor profile (yours truly included). So we’re going to start with texture not only because it’s more accessible, but also because often it reveals more about the wine than its flavors.

If you like acronyms and weren’t traumatized by college admissions tests, you might find it helpful to commit to memory “A.C.T.”, which stands for Acid, Concentration, and Tannin. These are the three core components of texture. As you take your first sip and let it coat your mouth, focus on the levels of each from low to high, as they will tell you a lot about the wine.

Acid

Is your mouth watering? If so, or if it tastes tart or even sour, this indicates acid levels toward the higher end of the spectrum. You’ll hear terms like dry, or even razor-sharp.

What can high acid levels tell us about a wine? First off, it’s important to remember that there are lots of reasons why a wine could end up as it does, so there are no absolutes when it comes to explaining this stuff. However, if we go all the way back to the vineyard, we can make some reasonable guesses about what high acid might mean.

If you’ve ever picked fruit when it wasn’t ready, you’ve probably noticed it’s more sour, and certainly less sweet than it would be if you let it ripen. So it wouldn’t be crazy to guess that higher acid wines tend to come from less ripened fruit. If we think about agriculture more broadly, one obvious reason we might end up with unripened fruit is simply picking it earlier in the season! When to pick is one of the most important decisions a winemaker makes, and we’ll get into that more in future posts.

The other huge factor in ripeness is the climate. Higher temperatures ripen fruit faster. Cooler weather means the fruit can mature for longer, retaining its acid, without developing too much sugar. If your mouth is watering intensely, you can reasonably write off a lot of hot climates that wouldn’t allow so much acid to end up in the wine, whereas high pH levels indicate the opposite.

There’s a lot more to analyze, so we’ll move on for now, but you can tell a lot about what you’re drinking just by noting salivation levels.

Concentration

Concentration refers to the intensity of flavor as well as the viscosity of the wine. Highly concentrated wines will coat your palate, lingering long after they've been swallowed. Whether this is good or bad depends entirely on how much you enjoyed the wine!

Concentration is determined by a number of things, some of which we’ve touched on already. As with acid, it all starts in the vineyard, with the main factors being the water and sugar contents of the grapes when they are picked. Think about raisins. They have a higher concentration of flavor then a fresh grape, and they are chewier in texture. The same concept applies here.

Like any fruit, the more a grape ripens, the more sugar it develops. This generally also coincides with a drop in water content, though crucially, it also depends on rainfall, vine age, and agricultural practices such as irrigation.

This sugar is eventually converted to alcohol in the fermentation process, so a higher sugar content often doesn’t mean a sweeter, thicker wine, just more alcohol. If the wine is borderline syrupy, you’re pretty safe to eliminate the thinner-skinned varieties. Conversely, if it disappears like fruit juice, you’re probably not looking at a Syrah or a Cabernet Sauvignon.

Tannin

That’s a lot, and you haven't even talked about flavor yet!

Fair point. But I promise you it’s worth making it to the end. With texture under your belt, everything in part two will feel much more approachable.

Tannins are natural compounds in wine that impart astringency, bitterness, and structure. Keep in mind that tannin is not a feature of white wine, so we’re talking strictly about red (and orange) wines when we analyze tannin.

If you follow us on Instagram or YouTube, you will have seen Roby refer to acid as the “backbone” of a wine, and tannin as the “muscle”. Whereas acid makes your mouth water, tannin dries it out. These contrasting sensations are what we refer to as tension. Every palate is different, and some occasions may fit one over the other. Classically, however, when these two are in perfect harmony, we call a wine in balance, which is an artifact of quality.

The primary source of tannins is the plant itself. They can come from the seeds, skins, and stems. Oak barrels are also a source of tannins, though we won’t worry about that for now. While some varieties naturally impart more tannins than others into the juice, tannins tell us loads about the winemaking process.

When we crush fruit to get the juice out, we have a couple choices:

1. Do we separate the fruit from the green stuff beforehand? Removing stems from the fermentation limits what kinds of tannins get into the wine.
2. Do we separate the juice immediately, or let it sit? The longer the juice mingles with the plant material, the more tannin it will absorb. This process is called maceration.

These are just two among many decisions that would impart tannin into a wine, but we’ll leave others for future posts. What we taste here will identify how the winemaker chose to answer these questions.

If you find yourself licking your teeth or the roof of your mouth after tasting, you’re probably looking at a wine with medium to high levels of tannin. This is because the matter in the wine is physically stripping the fat off your tongue and other surfaces in your mouth. This is why we often refer to tannic wines as “food wines”. It’s a huge reason wine and cheese make such an iconic pairing.

If you find a high tannin wine, you can quickly write off many varieties such as Pinot Noir, Gamay, and Grenache because they either lack the attributes to produce a highly tannic wine, or because stylistically they are rarely made in such a way as to possess lots of tannins.

Final step: Evaluate

Now it's time to put all of the elements together and evaluate the wine as a whole. Based on what you've observed, we now try to guess the following:

• The grape(s)
• The region (as specific as you care to guess)
• The producer (advanced - but if you taste enough from a single region, stylistic differences begin to stand out!)
• The vintage (super advanced - very few people have the knowledge to correctly guess a year. A more intermediate call would be a statement that coheres with your takeaways, such as, “a cool vintage in the past five years.”)

Remember that it’s not about getting it 100% correct. It’s about being justified in your answers.

But I don’t know which grapes or regions possess these characteristics.

There’s no denying that background knowledge makes it easier to match these observations to the list above.

However, now that you have a system, every wine becomes a data point. Once you understand the winemaking process and how it impacts the final product, all you need to do is... taste more wine! Blind tasting truly is the most enjoyable form of data collection.

Conclusion

You made it to the end, congratulations! For your reward, email admin@sommdemand.com with the subject line G.R.E.A.M. (Grenache Rules Everything Around Me), and get a free half bottle (Somm’s choice) added to your next order within 14 days of this post.

I hope you feel a little more excited about blind tasting. In part two, we’ll talk about flavor, and how it can help you improve your calls. If you feel like you just need some help getting started, feel free to book some time with a Somm, and we’ll get you on the road to blinding like a champ!