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\u2026and then you get rid of it!!??!! Yes, that is exactly what you should do, for a number of reasons. Maybe you didn\u2019t 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\u2019t drink all the wine that will be served because you\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t think they would be used, they wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019t want to be drunk, and the wineries even more so don\u2019t want you getting drunk on their premises.<\/p>\n
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\u2019ve seen it; we\u2019ve done it once or twice; and believe us, it\u2019s not an edifying spectacle. Try to imagine if everyone\u2026on second thought, don\u2019t try to imagine it.<\/p>\n
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, \u201cWould you like a little more?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
And the wineries don\u2019t care. Don\u2019t be embarrassed or feel that you\u2019re insulting either the server or the winemaker by pouring away perfectly good wine. They want you to taste<\/em> their wine, and once you\u2019ve tasted it, it\u2019s okay if you don\u2019t taste it all.<\/p>\n Sometimes we just don\u2019t 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, \u201cOh, don\u2019t worry about it\u201d. 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\u2019s not really possible with three millimeters at the bottom.<\/p>\n A healthy pour doesn\u2019t have to be a healthy swig. That\u2019s what the bucket is for. So use it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2026and then you get rid of it!!??!! Yes, that is exactly what you should do, for a number of reasons. Maybe you didn\u2019t like it. Maybe you were … Continue reading What to do with that Bucket on the Bar?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions\/25"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}