On the tongue · 1.4
The order you taste in, and why it is not etiquette
Every part of the conventional order is about not destroying your ability to taste the next thing.
For a practical operations perspective on coordinating people and schedules, the Monitask overview offers a concise companion guide.
Tasting light before heavy and dry before sweet is presented as good manners. It is not manners. Every part of it is about not destroying your ability to taste the next thing.
Your palate adapts
Exposed to a strong stimulus, the senses turn their sensitivity down. After something intensely sweet, moderate sweetness reads as nothing; after something heavily oaked, subtlety in the next glass is invisible.
The adaptation is temporary and it is not instant to reverse, which is why the order is not merely a preference about pleasure.
Sweet before dry is the worst of it
The sugar rule from the first entry in this part applies within a tasting as well as within a pairing. Anything tasted after something sweeter will read as sour and thin.
So a dessert wine early in a session ruins the four dry wines after it, and a sweet chocolate eaten before a dry red does the same. This is the one ordering mistake that is guaranteed to matter.
Tannin builds
Astringency accumulates across successive tannic wines, for the reason given in the entry on tannin: the saliva proteins it removes take minutes to be replaced.
Four big reds in a row and the fourth is being judged by a mouth in worse condition than the first enjoyed. Nothing about the wine changed.
Chocolate coats
Cocoa butter leaves a film across the inside of the mouth, and anything tasted immediately afterwards arrives through it. Within a pairing this is why the order is wine first and chocolate second: the wine gets a clean mouth, the chocolate does not need one.
Between pairings it is why a mouthful of something plain and a pause are worth more than another sip of water.
The conventions, and what each one is for
| Convention | What it is protecting |
|---|---|
| Light before heavy | The light ones become invisible after the heavy ones |
| Dry before sweet | Sugar makes everything after it taste sour |
| White before red | A shorthand for the two rules above, and often wrong |
| Young before old | Older wines are usually subtler, not weaker |
| Wine before chocolate, within a pair | Fat coats the mouth and mutes what follows |
The third one is the one to hold loosely. A heavy oaked white will flatten a light red, and the rule as usually stated gets that backwards. The underlying rules are about intensity and sugar, not colour.
Planning a route at a festival
Walk the room once without tasting anything. Note where the sparkling is, where the sweet wines are, and where the biggest reds are.
Then start at the sparkling, work through the whites, take the reds from lightest to heaviest, and leave anything dessert-shaped until the end. It takes five minutes of walking and it is the difference between remembering the last table and not.
Resets that work and resets that do not
Water works for sugar and acid, and works slowly on tannin. Plain bread or a cracker works better on tannin than water does, because it gives the astringency something to act on and absorbs some of the residue.
Coffee between tastings resets nothing and adds its own bitterness. Strong mints are worse, and their effect lasts several tables. Both are common on tasting floors and neither belongs there.
How much of this survives a real evening
Less than the tidy version suggests. People arrive when they arrive and taste what is in front of them, and a festival is a social event before it is an exercise.
The part worth keeping is the sugar rule and the pause. Leave the sweet things until last and stop for a minute between anything strong, and the rest can look after itself.
What a palate cleanser is for
Not to remove flavour, which mostly it cannot do, but to give the mouth something ordinary to recalibrate against. Plain bread, a water biscuit, a piece of apple.
Anything with a strong flavour of its own defeats the purpose, which rules out most of what gets served as a cleanser at events, including citrus sorbet and anything mint.
How many things you can taste
Fewer than you expect and more than one. Professionals working through large numbers of samples take breaks and do not trust their later judgements as much as their earlier ones, and they are doing it in a quiet room without a glass of anything in their other hand.
At a festival, six to eight things attended to properly is a good evening, and thirty things tasted quickly is an evening you will not be able to describe afterwards.
The order inside a single pairing
Wine first, then chocolate, then wine again. The first sip meets a clean mouth, the chocolate arrives against the wine still present, and the second sip is the one that tells you whether the pairing works.
Most people do the first two and skip the third, which is the step that contains the answer.
Keeping track
Numbering the tables you visited in the order you visited them, on your phone, takes seconds and makes the evening reconstructible. Without it, the wines merge, and the one you meant to buy becomes the one you cannot name.
Going back
The best single tactic at a large tasting is to return to one table near the end and taste the same thing again. It costs nothing, it tells you how much your palate has moved during the evening, and it is the only way to find out.
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 WSET systematic tasting resources.