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.