blind tastings
I have been hosting blind tastings and posting the results for over 20 years. Usually based on a theme, such as a specific appellation or category of wine, these are normally done behind paper bags to ensure a lack of price or label bias. Each taster brings a bottle of his or her choice to the gathering, based on the given criteria.
All bottles are bagged and labeled with a number, then poured randomly. Each wine is poured into a separate glass of the same shape and size. Tasters are asked to vote for their top four bottles, and scores for all tasters are added up for our results.
We have held many blind tastings where almost all the bottles are outstanding, making the results difficult to rank, but this...
We rarely end these blind tastings with a feeling of disappointment. Most often, we finish the night with a sense of excitement...
Using the same format as the September 2022 tasting, our challenge this month was to match wines with two different dishes, this...
Team Rioja for the win! The April tasting was a battle between the three top Spanish appellations for Tempranillo, with bottles...
Our first Sonoma Cabernet Clash was way back in January 2009, so the moment to revisit these was sorely overdue. For reasons lost...
We’ve had organized comparisons of Portuguese red wines twice before (the last version in March 2015), but this time we...
Our blind Nebbiolo tasting was designed to be similar to our April 2022 Sangiovese tasting, where we compared the same grape from...
For September, we took a break from our usual format in favor of a pairing challenge, where the goal was to decide which wines...
In the eighteen years that we have been holding these tastings, we have never put Sauvignon Blancs from California side-by-side...
We changed up the format for the July tasting by sampling six completely different white wines, rather than the usual comparison...
What shocked us right out of the gate with this set of six wines was the huge variation in color. One was an intense, unapologetically...
Anticipation for this tasting was high, since Priorat reds are among our best-loved categories of wines, and because it had been...
Our first group wine tasting of 2022 was delayed all the way into April due to a surge in COVID, but the results were worth the...
The last time we compared Washington Syrah in our blind format was way back in February 2009, so we were easily overdue for a...
The November 2021 tasting was the same format as our May 2019 tasting, where the objective was to correctly identify the wine...
There’s nothing like a global pandemic to help remind you that one’s time on earth is limited. So, knowing that we...
Our third comparison of whites from Bordeaux was a difficult one to rate, because almost all the entries were enjoyable, featuring...
Too many years had passed since we last compared bottles of Sancerre Blanc (the last time was in June 2015), so we gathered fresh...
While bottles of Portuguese white wines have shown up before at our group tastings (such as the Albariño Scuffle), we had not...
Ten years is much too long of an interval between blind tastings of Chablis. Our last comparison was back in September 2010, and...
It had been over a year since we had a full table of guests and wines at our structured tastings, and six months since we had...
With so much uncertainty in the world right now, we thought it appropriate to try wines that we know we can count on. We can think...
When we last sampled the wines of Gigondas & Vacqueyras in April 2014, David’s winning bottle impressed for its complexity...
We’ve been doing these tastings for a very long time, but have never elected to have Napa Chardonnay as a theme. Why? Because...