At a tasting · 5.1

How to walk a tasting and remember any of it

Walk it once first, taste six to eight things, and write two words at each table. Everything else is a refinement of those three.

For a practical operations perspective on coordinating people and schedules, the Monitask overview offers a concise companion guide.

A room with forty tables in it defeats most people by the twelfth. Here is what to do about that, and none of it is difficult.

Walk it first

Once around the whole room without tasting anything. Five minutes, and it tells you where the sparkling is, where the sweet wines are, where the biggest reds are, and which tables have queues.

Without it you taste in the order the aisles happen to run, which is the order the organisers used to fit the tables in and has nothing to do with your palate.

Taste fewer things

Six to eight things attended to properly is a good evening. Thirty things tasted quickly is an evening you cannot describe the next morning.

The limit is real rather than a counsel of moderation: the entry on the order of tasting explains why the palate adapts and why astringency accumulates, and neither of those is defeated by determination.

Two words per thing

On a phone, at the table, before moving on. The producer and one word for what it was. Not a tasting note; a label you can recognise later.

An hour afterwards the wines merge, and the one you meant to buy becomes the one you cannot name. This costs four seconds each and it is the difference between a memory and a blur.

Eat first

Properly, before arriving. Food slows absorption, and the small pours at a tasting add up faster than people expect because nobody is counting.

Bread and plain crackers on the tables are there for the palate rather than as a meal, and they are not a substitute for having eaten.

Use the spittoon

It loses nothing, for the reason the entry on the finish explains: the flavour that persists comes from what coats your mouth rather than from what you swallow.

Everybody who tastes for a living does it, no one at a table thinks anything of it, and it is the single practice that most improves what you remember.

Water, and what it does

Rinse and swallow between tables. It clears sugar and acid quickly and tannin slowly, and it also addresses the other thing a warm room full of people does to you.

Still rather than sparkling, because carbonation adds acidity to a mouth you are trying to return to neutral.

Ask one question per table

The people pouring know their wine and are standing there for hours hoping somebody will ask. One question is enough and it does not have to be clever: where does it sit on their sweetness range, or how it was made, or what they would eat with it.

Their answer will improve the next twenty minutes more than another sample would.

Go back to one table at the end

Taste something you tasted at the start. It tells you how far your palate has moved during the evening, which is information about yourself that you cannot get any other way.

It is also frequently the moment somebody discovers that the wine they were about to buy is not what they thought it was two hours ago.

The part nobody writes down

This is a social event held to raise money, not an examination. People are here with friends, there is a band, and the person next to you is having a conversation rather than assessing anything.

The advice above is for whatever fraction of the evening you want to spend paying attention. Applying all of it rigorously for three hours would be a strange way to attend a party.

The short version

Walk it first. Six to eight things. Two words each. Eat beforehand, spit, drink water, ask one question, and go back to one table at the end.

Working with the crowd

Tables near the entrance are busiest for the first hour and quietest at the end. Tables at the far corners are the reverse. If a producer you wanted to speak to has three people deep in front of them, come back rather than queue: the conversation is the point and it will not happen in a scrum.

Pacing the evening

An hour of attention, then a break with food and a conversation, then a shorter second pass with whatever you want to buy. Three hours of continuous tasting is beyond almost everybody and produces a worse result than half of it.

The break is not lost time. Palate recovery is real and it is the only thing that restores what accumulates.

And the one rule that overrides all of it

You are at a party in aid of a charity. If the choice is between tasting attentively and talking to somebody, take the conversation. The wine will be there next year.

If you are going with somebody

Split the room and compare. Two people covering different aisles and meeting halfway see twice as much, and the recommendations you give each other are better than anything you would have found alone.

And afterwards

Read your notes the next morning while the evening is still recent. Half of them will make sense and half will not, and the half that does is what you actually learned.

What to do in the first ten minutes

Get a glass of water, walk the room, and find where the spittoons and the bread are. Doing that before the first taste rather than after the sixth changes the whole evening, and almost nobody does 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 CDC alcohol-use information.