Starting Your Own Wine Tasting Group

Leading a group through an extended series of tastings is ambitious, but lots of fun. Beware of the Summer months, it is much easier to keep a group together when the days are short and the nights are cold.

All tastings should be blind. If you have everyone bring a bottle (remember, 3 flights of 3 wines each, for a total of 9 wines, is the ideal tasting [and 15 people are max, 10 is better]) make sure they cover the label and remove the capsule before anyone else can see the wine. My group often decants the wine into Evian bottles, because we are pros, and the slightest hint starts us guessing.

Avoid food at tastings unless the focus of the tasting is food and wine pairings. Make sure you have something to eat for after the tasting. My casual (as opposed to professional) tasting group brings a pot luck dinner for after the tasting.

I would recommend that for the first year your tastings be primarily about recognizing varietal character in wines. So make the tastings specific to one type of grape variety. Don't be afraid to repeat some varietals, especially those that range across a huge amount of prices, such as Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay.

The is especially important for US wine tasters, because it is how our wine is labeled.

Once everyone has a fairly good grasp of the varietal character it is time to move on to regional character. Again taste all one varietal, but now start highlighting regions around the world that grow the same grape variety. Cabs are a great example of this. You can do dozens of tasting using Cab based wines alone. As your group becomes more comfortable with tasting, narrow your scope. Instead of Cabs of the world, do Bordeaux regions, or Alexander Valley vs. Napa, that sort of more local geographical range.

Germany and Burgundy will require more tastings than you could hope to hold, so make sure to throw one in now and then.

Once your group has varietals and geography pretty well down (they don't have to be experts, just understand the differences), start doing tastings where you guess the variety and regions of the wines. Not only will this put you in the big leagues of tasting, but it will sharpen each of your pallets to perfection.

All told, expect it to take 4 years of tasting (6 tastings or so a year - 12 sounds good but chances are you may have trouble getting a group together that often) before you settle down to the "guess this wine" stage.

My wine school accelerates this schedule down to a 2 week intensive training, with the same 24 tastings or so. The school has the advantage in that there is not a long period of time between tastings. So not only do I cram 4 years of training into 2 weeks, a great deal more can be learned.