Blind Tasting Is Not About Being Right
Typicity, surprise, and the freedom to misrecognize wine
I’m not preparing for a sommelier exam. I’m not judging wine competitions. And I certainly don’t make bets where I can end up publicly humiliating myself by mistaking a Kirkland Lalande-de-Pomerol for a GSM blend from the Southern Rhône. (Yes, that really happened). If you are anything like me, why would you do blind tasting at all?
Was it already said enough about biases? We are told we need to eliminate them from every sphere of our life. I’m being mildly sarcastic, of course - “bias” became one of the favorite words of the 21st century. But awareness rarely eliminates anything. It only makes us notice our habits more clearly. What I want to talk about here is that a blind tasting helps us to taste something without preconceptions but… also creates some other biases!
Just recently I had a white wine from a brown-bagged bottle that my husband poured for me, and I loved it. It wasn’t a spectacular one, but certainly one of those which I wanted a full glass of. I placed it right into Alto Adige, but I didn’t think of Pinot Gris – which it was… Why? Because so far, my experience told me – I am not a fan of any styles of Pinot Gris/Grigio. More than that – if I saw the label I might have not liked it because biases can create that stale taste in your mouth even before you take a sip. How many of us don’t even register their assumptions? Is it easy to admit that nice label or name of the famous location, known producer or price of a bottle influence judgement and even enjoyment of wine? Let yourself be surprised. Drink wine not knowing what it is and suddenly re-discover something in new light (or shall I say darkness instead?). Blind tasting allows surprise back into wine. A grape you thought you disliked suddenly becomes delicious. A humble bottle becomes the one you want a second glass of. And sometimes an expensive, famous wine reveals itself to be merely impressive rather than pleasurable.
For me blind tasting is a great game, discovery time and a humbling instrument. And it is also my favorite way of conducting tasting events. Starting with the senses rather than the label is, for me, the best way I can offer for discovering whether someone truly connects with a wine. Blind tasting becomes not just a game, but a way to track an evolving palate - and occasionally to argue with it.
And so, I drink from a brown-bagged bottle in the name of removing bias. Then comes the reveal - and even experienced tasters get it wrong. The supposed GSM child of Southern Rhône heat and garrigue turns out to be a Merlot-driven Lalande-de-Pomerol. This was not some high-elevation Grenache mistaken for Pinot Noir - the kind of mistake that at least shares a certain logic. This was a wine from hundreds of kilometers away and from a completely different grape tradition, style, and terroir language.
What do I feel - humility or indignation? I swear to you: that wine behaved nothing like Bordeaux usually does - right or left. In color, in tannins, in the nose and on the palate - everywhere it avoided recognition. We want to be right, or at least close. We build libraries in our heads, noses, and palates and trust them to guide us. This is where a new bias comes in. The instinct is immediate: if typicity is missing, the wine must be manipulated somehow - polished into anonymity, stripped of honesty... If the personality of the grape is muted and terroir’s voice is softened to a whisper, then its identity is taken away. But is that always an objective truth? I do love it when wine speaks with familiar tongues of grapes and recognizable geographical accents and dialects. But can we allow a wine to taste like a foreigner and still declare it damn good? Where do we draw the line between “absence of typicity is part of the personality” and “if you want to work with Pinot, why not go where it grows naturally instead of turning it into Zinfandel”? And how differently would we experience that same wine if we first met it blind - as a stranger - versus meeting it already introduced by the label?
Let’s try to detach from typicity alone and see what else makes wine good or even great. Like that is a straightforward question! But seriously.
Balance. To me, balance can never be overrated. Elusive and impossible to fully quantify, it involves every component - taste, texture, aroma, structure - and once balance is off, the wine immediately feels excessive in some direction. Tannins are too harsh, wine turns flat, bitter with oak, or excessively buttery. Shrill acidity no longer refreshes but pierces. Sweetness becomes cloying instead of seductive. Alcohol burns rather than lifts aroma and warms the palate. I can go on for a long time. But just balance alone is not enough to declare wine great. It can feel technically correct but boring and soulless…
What else are we looking for in a good wine? Complexity – tricky term, sometimes abused, sometimes too broad or vague. I use it here thinking about wines that are not simple or not linear in their aromatic behavior. Truly complex wines resist falling neatly into one aromatic category. Fruity and floral can be in the same orchestra with earthy, mineral and herbal – with one leading or not, easily split like petals or integrated in a single weaved fabric. But complexity alone does not validate wine as a great one. It can be tiring or chaotic, conflicting and unbalanced. And on the other hand, not all great wines are complex. Greatest white Burgundies or Champagnes that I had in my life were very precise with a few aromas and great balance – pure beauty without need for any adornments.
Evolution is sometimes treated as part of complexity. But for me it’s a little bit different. Complexity can be quick to be discovered. Evolution means that wine takes time to show itself. Some of my favorite wines are the ones that make you wait. Narrow at first, they ask for oxygen, warmth, and time before unfolding. It’s like watching the flower opening from bud into full bloom. However, wine does not necessarily evolve into something more and more beautiful or pleasantly surprising. Evolution can be a decay or decline. Or if wine evolves onto something amazing but puts you off at the start – it is not a good thing too. I might be the one willing to take the challenge and give wine a chance – but it doesn’t mean that only people who know “the secret” should be understanding wine’s greatness.
Structure. Some call it spine; some say that wine has architecture. I like structure. I visualize it not like scaffolding or like perfect arrangement of a pantry. To me it’s more like a human skeleton. Structure holds wine together preventing it from becoming too soft, amorphous and shapeless. It is like our bones that allow all the vital organs to be in their exact place, all the softness and beauty of our flesh and skin to be presented on the outside, let veins and nerves maintain their course confidently, and muscles to find support hugging bones tightly. How does structure reveal itself? It is in the firmness of tannins that we feel on the gums. And in the sharpness of acidity that keeps wine fresh even when it warms up. In interplay of acidity and sugar that prevents dessert wine from cloying. It’s in the phenolic bitterness that keeps palate awake. Alcohol lifts the aromas and produces heat and weight in the mouth. And of course, on its own structure doesn’t make wine great – just like a skeleton without flesh and veins doesn’t make a body.
Integrity. That is a slippery slope, but also important when understood well. Integrity is what makes all the elements of a wine feel internally coherent rather than merely present. It’s bigger than balance or structure – it’s coherence between all components and all sensory characteristics in wine resulting in overall harmony of body, aroma, texture, balance of flavors and structure. It is the one that firmly brings typicity into the picture, because it also means coherence between label information and exhibited characteristics, promising experience of the terroir, varietals and style. So, that is where we would have our unrecognized wine stumbling a bit…
Emotional impact. It wouldn’t be me if I hadn’t brought up some metaphysics and soul of the wine into this picture of qualities. You won’t find on wine critics tasting notes “this wine is characterized by medium body, high acidity, velvet tannins and nose of ripe wild raspberries, violets and freshly crushed black pepper. And it makes me feel like dancing”. But to me – it’s what I drink wine for and how I experience it. In the end – did it make you feel anything other than appreciation of winemaking practices, clarity of terroir, balance and well-integrated oak? Did your brows go up in pleasant surprise? Did it make you smile and think of a friend who is going to like it? Did you feel nostalgic or hear music in your head? Wine is art – not just skill and tradition – and art moves us, makes us know that we have a soul, wakes up memories and stirs emotions… Is this important to you too?
Aging potential is bonus quality. Fair but rare. Debatable. Most likely everyone who reads this article understands what small percentage of wine would benefit from aging. We are not talking about ones that would just avoid turning into vinegar and rusty pipe water in 6-10 years and become simply sad like expired prunes or spring pile of hay. Those are wines that will gain something over years of maturation in a bottle. Like the best Rieslings that would become of an incredible texture and acquire petrol notes that strangely attract instead of reminding of stinky asphalt of an old gas station. Like Rioja Reserva with which you inhale a castle library with ancient leather-bound books, cold fireplace, aromatic pipe tobacco and cedar wood chairs. It’s enticing, romantic and mysterious. The taste of anticipation of such transformation over years is real in today’s wine. But we also know that often such quality makes wine unapproachable or fully closed and simply not good for years and years. And at our pace of life even severe traditionalists of Left Bank and Piedmont are inclined to soften their hearts and wines in order to make younger wines more enjoyable.
Look – we are at the bottom of the list, and we are closing the circle now. We are in a blind tasting, and we can’t guess what this wine is and where it comes from. Typicity is gone. And that’s where we shall remember that identifying the wine is not actually why we are doing it. We agreed above – we are not trying to pass the test, not in the performance or skill demonstration setting. With the luxury of not seeing the label, we can immerse ourselves fully in the wine before classification takes over. So, if we make that the goal of our tasting, typicity becomes one dimension of greatness rather than its definition. And we are open to the opportunities to say “Wow!” instead of “Oh, it’s not a Bordeaux!” or “God, I’m so embarrassed!” after the label is revealed...
Am I asking you to embrace the idea of wines that challenge typicity as part of the definition of what good or great wine is? Not at all. I am asking you: keep the ability to be pleasantly surprised.