Andrew Polmear writes for the love of wine…

There’s a saying in the wine trade: “a glimpse of the label is worth 20 years of tasting experience”. That’s true if you are trying to impress. But for those of us who just want to enjoy wine I think the opposite is more true: “blind tasting will show you what you really like and save you money”.

This was brought home to me recently at a tasting organised by The Wine Society in Lewes. Two hundred members gathered in the Assembly Rooms, where we found ten tables, each with two bottles, whose labels were masked. We were given a booklet of questions in which to write our answers. For instance, the first table had two bottles of bubbly and the question was: which one of these is champagne and which is a New World sparkling wine at less than half the price? Not all the pairs were wines of different price. Table 9 had a Pauillac (Bordeaux’s ‘best’ village) matched against a New Zealand Cabernet-Merlot at the same price. At the end of the session the organiser asked us to vote for the alternatives before revealing the answers. Continue reading Blind Tasting →