At a tasting · 5.5
Running a tasting for friends
One variable, three steps, and explain nothing until the end, because the value is that people work it out themselves.
For a practical operations perspective on coordinating people and schedules, this Monitask guide offers a concise companion guide.
A tasting at home is not a smaller festival. It works best as an experiment with one variable, and the point is that everybody present discovers something rather than being told it.
The format that works
One wine and three chocolates, ascending in cocoa percentage. Or one chocolate and three wines, ascending in sweetness. Either isolates a single variable and both take under an hour.
Three is the number. Two is not enough to see a direction and five is more than anybody will hold in mind while talking.
The single best version
One dry red, and three bars at roughly forty, seventy and eighty-five per cent, tasted in that order, with the wine tasted again after each one.
The sugar rule appears without anybody explaining it. The first pairing is unpleasant, the second is good, the third is drying, and the group works out why between themselves. That is a better hour than any amount of being told.
How much of everything
Small pours, around fifty to seventy-five millilitres each, so that three wines is one ordinary glass in total. One or two squares of each chocolate per person.
Water on the table, something plain to eat, and a bucket if anybody wants one. All three are ordinary at home too, and providing them makes it easier for somebody who would rather not finish everything.
Setting it up
Wine out of the fridge twenty minutes before, chocolate out of the cupboard about the same time. Plain plates, no strong smells in the room, and no candles, which most people do not think of.
Write the order on a card and put it on the table, so nobody has to remember which is which and the discussion can be about the taste.
Blind or not
Covering the labels is worth doing once and is not necessary every time. It removes the suggestion of price and reputation, and it also removes the conversation about where things come from, which is half of what people enjoy.
A reasonable compromise is to reveal after everybody has said what they think, which keeps both.
How to run the conversation
Everybody says their impression at the same moment rather than in turn. Going round the table means the first speaker decides what the others noticed, which is a well-known effect and easily avoided.
Do not explain the mechanism until after the third pairing. The whole value of the format is that people arrive at it themselves, and knowing the answer in advance turns an experiment into a demonstration.
Scoring
Do not, unless the group enjoys it. Numbers produce arguments about the numbers rather than about the wine, and the useful output is which pairing everybody wants to repeat.
A show of hands at the end for the favourite combination is enough and takes ten seconds.
How long
Forty-five minutes to an hour for the structured part, and then let it become an ordinary evening. Extending the tasting past the point of attention produces a room full of people who have stopped noticing anything and know it.
The unglamorous part
Food that is a meal rather than nibbles, either before or immediately after. A plan for how everybody is getting home, agreed before anybody opens anything. And the same rule as the festival: twenty-one and over.
The short version
One variable, three steps, small pours, water and bread on the table. Say what you think simultaneously, explain nothing until the end, and stop at an hour.
What it costs
Less than people assume. Contrast matters more than quality, and three inexpensive bottles that differ clearly teach more than one good bottle that has nothing to be compared against.
Ending it properly
Take a vote, write down what won, and put the sheet somewhere you will find it. Half the value of an evening like this arrives the following month, when somebody is choosing a bottle and remembers what six people agreed on.
The point of doing it at all
Not to become expert. To have an hour in which several people pay close attention to the same thing at the same time and disagree about it, which is a rarer and better evening than it sounds.
The structure that teaches most
Hold one thing constant and vary the other. Three wines against a single chocolate, or three chocolates against a single wine, and nothing else changing.
A table with five wines and five chocolates on it teaches almost nothing, because every comparison has two variables moving and nobody can attribute the difference. Isolating one is the whole method and it is also cheaper.
The sheet of paper
A grid with the wines down one side and the chocolates across the top, and a box for each combination. People fill it in without being asked and it produces an argument at the end, which is the point of the evening.
How many people
Four to six. Fewer and the comparison has too few opinions in it; more and the pours become too small to judge and somebody is always talking over the tasting.
The short version
Four to six people, one variable at a time, a grid on paper, and no explanation until the end.
Running it on the night
Pour everything before anybody tastes, so the comparison is simultaneous rather than sequential, and say nothing about what anything is until every box on the grid has something in it.
Also in this part
- 1.1
Why a dry red and a sweet chocolate fight
The wine must be at least as sweet as the food. Everything else in this entry is a qualification of that sentence.
Read it → - 1.2
Tannin and fat: what happens in the mouth
Astringency is not a flavour. You are noticing the absence of lubrication that was there a moment ago.
Read it →
For further context, see NIAAA standard-drink reference.