We are celebrating the start of the third year of our neighborhood wine tasting club.  We call it a wine club, but the fact is we have had tequila and Octoberfest beer tastings as well, so it’s very wide open as to the topic and the main goal is simply to get together with our friends and neighbors and enjoy each other’s company.  Oh, and maybe we learn something new about wine, tequila or beer along the way too. 

One way to meet your resolution to taste more wines this year is to host your own tasting.  We recommend hosting a tasting for anyone looking to try new wines and learn from one another.  It is very easy to do and can be as informal or elaborate as you like.  You can see some examples by going to the Pelly Wine Club pages.

Here are some basics to get started with:

1. Relax and don’t try to be an expert or think you need to be one.  Again, it’s about the company and having a learning and/or drinking experience.

2. Take notes.  Taking notes helps you remember the wines you liked and may want to purchase down the road, especially after tasting a lot of wines, the memory of that evening might get a little blurry.    Don’t worry about what your notes say, but rather use descriptions that you know and will recognize.  If it tastes like blackberries and you like that taste, write that down, but I have never tasted gooseberries or elderberries, so I would never use those terms.  Click below for some examples of tasting note cards (Powerpoint .PPT format):            

Bordeaux

Basic

S Hemi

3. Snacks are a good idea both for counteracting alcohol consumption (we talk about spit and dump buckets below) and palate cleansing between wines.  Some foods can mess with the palate such as spicy sausage or certain cheeses, so stick with plain crackers or bread (i.e. French, but NOT sourdough) if you are just doing a blind tasting and not trying to do pairings with food. Often, we will start our parties at 8pm+ so that participants have a chance to eat dinner or something prior to attending the tasting.

4. Don’t have guests bring wine in their own bags.  The host should bag the wines in identical wrapping (i.e. brown bag) and mark them with letters or numbers so that no one will be able to tell which wine they brought.  Sometimes, it helps to remove the foil on the neck, too.

5. Use a light tablecloth, white paper napkins, or white tasting note cards as this will allow for good background material to note the color of each wine.  Note: this doesn’t matter if you are doing more advanced pure blind tasting using black glasses and you don’t want to be influenced by the hue.

6. If you have guests new to the wine tasting experience, remind them to keep each taste to about 1 – 2 oz. and maybe you can show them about how much that is — we’ve had a few folks get kinda sloshed before reaching the last wine in the tasting and there’s certainly not anything wrong with that at our parties for sure — it makes for great stories.  You can remind everyone that after the tasting, they can pour full glasses of their favorites… in most cases, there is plenty of wine left to do this.

7. We prefer to go around the table or room to share some quick thoughts on each wine before moving onto the next one — sometimes we try to guess the wine and I even get lucky once in awhile.  There is no pressure for anyone to share their thoughts or notes if they don’t want to.  If your party is too large and folks are scattered around or you have multiple “stations” around your living, dining and family rooms, this isn’t possible and can wait until the end of the tasting to share notes.

8. Be sure to have some spit and dump buckets around so that guests can dump their wine if they don’t fancy it, or if they would like to reduce the chance of becoming intoxicated.  Professional tasters never consume and always spit as they taste many wines at one sitting and the effects of consumption can affect your ability to evaluate the wine as the night goes on.  We are a consumption tasting club in which almost everyone is drinking along the way and always continue the party into the late hours.  It’s your choice.  No need to get fancy as we use flower vases, pitchers or pots for this purpose.

9. To score or not to score — if you want to add a little competition to your party, have everyone score each wine from, say 1-5, and give the guests who brought the winning wine a small gift (i.e. corkscrew, wine glass charms, wine book, etc.)

That’s it!  Good luck and happy tasting.