Spit Or Swallow
When wine tasting, that is. Why professionals do it, when you should consider it, and why you almost certainly should not tonight.
A wine critic at a serious tasting can get through eighty, sometimes over a hundred, glasses in a day. Swallow even a mouthful of each and you're not tasting wine by lunchtime, you're being carried out of the building by lunchtime. Spitting isn't squeamishness. It's the only way to stay upright and still have a working opinion by glass sixty.
Why professionals do it
The job is comparative judgement across dozens of samples, not enjoyment of any single one. Alcohol dulls your senses fast and accumulates faster than most people expect across a long tasting — a sip here and a sip there adds up to a full glass or more by the end of a flight. Spitting keeps the palate, and the judgement behind it, sober enough to still mean something on wine ninety.
When you might, even outside a professional tasting
Driving is the obvious one — spitting doesn't reduce your blood alcohol to zero, some absorption happens through the mouth and throat before you spit, but it's meaningfully less than swallowing the same pour. Pregnancy is a firmer line: there's no established safe amount of alcohol at any stage, so a genuinely careful approach at a tasting is to taste and spit, not sip cautiously. Anyone driving home, on medication that interacts with alcohol, or just pacing themselves through a long lineup has a legitimate reason to spit that has nothing to do with performance.
How to actually do it
Badly, it's a dribble down your chin in front of people you were hoping to impress. Properly: take a normal-sized sip, hold it, then spit in one firm, continuous motion rather than several small ones — a bucket or spittoon should be close enough that you're not travelling far or aiming carefully. Most people find it takes a tasting or two to stop feeling self-conscious about it; professional tasting rooms have entire troughs built for exactly this reason, so nobody there is judging you for using one.
What you actually miss
Less than you'd think. The finish — the flavour that lingers after the wine's gone — comes mostly from wine residue still coating your mouth, not from the swallow itself, so spitting doesn't rob you of that. What you do lose is the wine's full body-feel: the warmth of alcohol moving down your throat, and whatever a full swallow contributes to how "complete" a wine feels going down. For a big, high-alcohol red, that's a genuinely different experience, spit versus swallowed.
Why you probably shouldn't, most of the time
Because for almost everyone, almost every time, the swallow is the entire point. You're not judging a hundred wines against each other for a professional score — you're having a glass with dinner, and spitting a wine you're enjoying just to look serious about it is missing the plot entirely. Save the spittoon for the one context it's actually built for: working through more wine in an afternoon than any one liver should reasonably process, and needing to still have an opinion at the end of it.