Category: Wine Tasting Tips

Lucie is writing this blog post.  Steve can smell all the aromas in a glass of wine but can’t smell perfume!

We are both very strong on the following advice: please everyone, guys and gals, do not travel with your bottle of perfume, cologne or after-shave when you go wine tasting.   Leave it at home when you go to Wine Country.  Perfume detracts from your tasting experience as well as that of those around you.

The idea of going wine tasting is to taste and smell the wines.  Perfume blocks all the wonderful aromas of what has been poured in your glass.  And since most of what we humans taste comes from our sense of smell, you don’t get the true flavor of the wine either.

Recently, we were at Joseph Phelps Vineyards in St. Helena.  While they are undergoing renovations at the winery, they were offering tastings under a marquee, outside besides the vineyard, below the winery.  Phelps is one of our favorite wineries in Napa Valley   When we reserved for our wine tasting, we were not told that the tasting room and patio where we had been many times before was being renovated. It was a surprise but not a good one.

Worst of all, there was a woman standing beside us at the bar wearing such a powdery perfume, I had to move away from her.  Unfortunately the scent of her perfume was all around, even if we were outside; imagine what it would have been like indoors.   Some smaller wineries have very small tasting rooms; her perfume would have been totally overwhelming.

Smelling that perfume made our tasting experience so unpleasant that it completely ruined Lucie’s visit, unable to get the bouquet and the taste of the wines being served… because of that perfume!

We insist that it is not only women we’re talking about, but men also.    Leave the Old Spice at home, guys.  When you taste wine, what you smell is as important as what you have in your mouth, so let’s all enjoy it to the maximum.

Cheers!

You are standing at a bar in a beautiful tasting room and a nice person pours you a glass of wine. You taste it, maybe you like it…and then you get rid of it!!??!! Yes, that is exactly what you should do, for a number of reasons. Maybe you didn’t like it. Maybe you were more interested in the reds than the whites. Most important if you want to taste a variety of wines at several vineyards, you can’t drink all the wine that will be served because you’ll get drunk. Every taster should know his or her limitations and getting to the bottom of every glass is going to hurry you along to your limit more quickly than you probably want.

For that reason, wineries leave buckets on the counter. Known unglamorously as spit buckets, their purpose is for discarding unwanted wine. If the wineries didn’t think they would be used, they wouldn’t put them there. Or looking at it the other way around, they put spit buckets there just so that you will use them. You don’t want to be drunk, and the wineries even more so don’t want you getting drunk on their premises.

People who taste wine for a living, such as wine makers and shop owners, taste a lot of wine at one time and have little choice but to discard most of it. They drink some wine, slosh it around their mouths and spit it into the bucket. We’ve seen it; we’ve done it once or twice; and believe us, it’s not an edifying spectacle. Try to imagine if everyone…on second thought, don’t try to imagine it.

In most cases, we share a tasting. So one of us breathes in the aroma, takes a sip and passes it to the other. The second one does the same thing and asks the first, “Would you like a little more?” If the answer is no, that one unobtrusively pours the remainder into the waiting bucket. Even if the glass was generously filled, we get rid of it, feeling no obligation to drink it all.

And the wineries don’t care. Don’t be embarrassed or feel that you’re insulting either the server or the winemaker by pouring away perfectly good wine. They want you to taste their wine, and once you’ve tasted it, it’s okay if you don’t taste it all.

Sometimes we just don’t like the wine they poured. So we pour it away, without ceremony or commentary, exactly as we would do if we really liked it. We pace ourselves for the one or two wines that we do want to drink all of. We sometimes ask servers not to pour us too much, precisely because we know we will use the bucket. Almost invariably, the server will say, “Oh, don’t worry about it”. They want us to get the full effect of their products, the look, the aroma, the aeration we achieve by swirling it in our glass. That’s not really possible with three millimeters at the bottom.

A healthy pour doesn’t have to be a healthy swig. That’s what the bucket is for. So use it.