Find Out What You Like With A Simple Wine Tasting
No spittoons, no tasting notes, no exam. Just six glasses lined up in the right order and a decade of assumptions about what you like, corrected in one evening.
A mate of mine spent a decade insisting she "just didn't like red wine." Turned out what she didn't like was one specific bottle of cheap, jammy, over-oaked red her uncle poured her at eighteen, and she'd been generalising from a sample size of one ever since. Twenty minutes with six small glasses lined up side by side fixed a decade-long misunderstanding. That's the entire case for running a proper tasting.
This isn't a sommelier exam
Forget spittoons, forget note cards, forget anyone swirling a glass for eleven seconds while frowning at it meaningfully. A wine tasting at home is just wine, glasses, and friends, arranged so you can actually compare rather than just drink. You're not being examined. Nobody fails.
The only rule that matters: taste things next to each other, not in isolation. A glass of oaked Chardonnay on its own is just a glass of wine. The same glass immediately after a bone-dry Riesling is a lesson — you'll taste the oak, the weight, the roundness, all the things you'd never notice drinking it alone on a Tuesday. Comparison is the whole trick. Your palate is bad at absolute judgements and excellent at relative ones.
Build a lineup that actually teaches you something
Don't just grab six bottles you fancy — pick ones that sit at different points on the same axis, so each glass makes the last one make sense. A good starter lineup, three whites and three reds:
Whites
- Acidic and fresh — a cool-climate Riesling or Sauvignon Blanc. Sharp, zippy, the wine equivalent of biting into a green apple.
- Full-bodied — an oaked Chardonnay. Rounder, weightier, with a vanilla-and-butter thing going on that's entirely down to the barrel, not the grape.
- Aromatic — Gewürztraminer. Lychee, rose petal, Turkish delight in a glass — divisive, and you want to know which side you're on.
Reds
- Light and fresh — a cool-climate Pinot Noir. Red berries, barely any grip, served slightly cool it drinks almost like a soft summer red.
- Full-bodied and jammy — a warm-climate Primitivo. Dark, sweet-fruited, dangerously easy to drink. Worth knowing: Primitivo and California's Zinfandel are, genetically, the exact same grape — same vine, different passport.
- Full-bodied and tannic — Cabernet Sauvignon. This is where you'll properly meet tannin, the stuff that makes your mouth feel like you've licked a teabag.
Six glasses, six clearly different experiences, and by the end everyone at the table has a genuine answer to "so what do you actually like," rather than a vague memory of a label.
Running it without it turning into homework
Pour small — thirty to forty millilitres per glass is plenty, this is about range, not volume. Go whites before reds, light before heavy, so nothing early on gets flattened by something heavier that came before it. Have water and plain crackers or bread on the table to reset your palate between glasses; don't bother with anything more elaborate, since you want the food doing nothing to the wine, not competing with it.
Skip the vocabulary test. Instead of "what aromas do you detect," ask the questions that actually generate an opinion: which one would you order again? Which one would you regret buying a whole bottle of? Which one tastes like it costs more than it does? Those questions get real answers. "Notes of stone fruit and a whisper of oak" gets you a table of people nodding along to a stranger's tasting note instead of forming their own.
Write down reactions as you go — not tasting notes, just which glass, one word each. By the end you'll have a rough map of what everyone actually reaches for, which is worth more than any wine quiz. Next bottle you buy for yourself, you'll be picking from evidence instead of a label you liked the look of.