Setting up the Tasting

Wine tastings work best when there is a theme. Whether this is a country, region, grape variety, price or vintage, having a common link will give your tasting a focus.

Have a manageable number of wines. Professional tasters may think nothing of tasting a couple of hundred wines in a sitting, but if you are doing it for fun, 6 to 8 wines should be ample (especially if your guests won't be spitting!)

Decide whether you will serve the wines openly or blind (ie by covering the label.) Blind tastings can be fun and very instructive, but may also put people off, adding an unnecessary pressure to a social event.

In terms of equipment, you will need glasses - allow for two per person if you're tasting both reds and whites - plus a tablecloth, preferrably white (for assessing the colour of the wine) and wipe-clean (for mis-directed spits!)

Any kitchen container will serve as a spitoon - ideally try to find a few opaque ones with narrow openings. For blind tastings, you will either need to decant the wines into identical wine bottles or decanters, or conceal them using tin foil. Remember to number the bottles - and keep track of which is which!

Guests will also need tasting notes for each wine, a tasting sheet so they can make notes and pencils to write with. Full tasting notes for any wine you order through Corney & Barrow can be printed off from the Corney & Barrow website. We recommend creating a tasting sheet for your guests similar to the layout below.

Assessing the Wines

When assessing wines, you should look at the appearance of the wine in the glass (the colour and the intensity of that colour), the nose of the wine (whether the aromas are young or more developed, plus their intensity and character) and the palate (how the wine tastes - dry or sweet, level of acidity, tannins for red wines, alcohol level, body, flavour intensity and character and whether the taste lingers or dies away quickly). All these factors are used by wine tasters to break down and assess the quality of a wine and it can be fascinating to try your hand at it for the first time.

Tasters tend to classify simple fruit flavours into citrus (lemon, lime), stone fruit (peach, apricot), orchard fruit (apple, pear) and tropical (mango, pineapple, lychee). Wines can also display floral flavours, such as apple blossom or rose petals. If the wine has been aged in oak barrels it may have a touch of vanilla, spice or toastiness. In good wines these characters should blend into the overall fruit flavours. As a wine matures it will develop more complex notes - you may notice leather, or in old wines even mushrooms.

The acidity of a wine is detected on your tongue - on the sides and underneath. Draw a good amount of air through the wine in your mouth, then spit or swallow and leave your mouth open for a few seconds. The more saliva in your mouth, the higher the acidity.

Tannins in a (red) wine come from the pips and the skin of the grapes, plus any oak which the wine has come into contact with during the fermentation or ageing process. A good way of detecting tannins is in the texture the wine leaves between your front teeth and gums and the inside of your top lip. Tannins can be hard to describe as they come in so many shapes and sizes, but try to get a feel for the level of them and whether they are fine-grained (which is good) or coarse (which is not!)

Don't forget, Corney & Barrow do a great selection of mixed cases which would be ideal to get you started with this and they are currently offering  free delivery on any mixed case orders when you quote "Debrett's" in the promotion box on the checkout.  Visit Corney & Barrow to browse their wine selection.

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