Tasting blind is the best way to know what your really think of a wine or mead. I devised an involved method to evaluate my boiled mead experiment, but here’s a simple method that the Lady of the House and I use for quick comparisons.

We have three different kinds of wine glasses: clear stems, blue stems, and red stems. When we want to do a quick tasting, We each pour up to three different wines into each kind of glass while the other is out of the room, note which is which, and then leave the room. We don’t know what we’re tasting as we scribble down our impressions of the “clear” wine or the “blue” wine. We only tell each other after we’re done sniffing, swirling, spitting, clearing our palates, and writing down what we think. Yes, I know what she’s tasting and she knows what I’m tasting, so it’s not double blind – that’s the price for a quick and easy setup. It’s not much of a price, though, because we’re both pretty focused on the wine in front of us.

Describing a wine

If you’re not a trained taster, it can be hard to know what to say about a wine. This is where comparing two of them side by side can help. The aroma: is one stronger than the other? Are they both strong or faint? Write that down. Do they differ in some way? Write that down – even if you have a hard time describing exactly how – “they differ in a way I can’t describe” is better than making something up or not writing down anything at all. Do the same thing for flavor (stronger, fainter, different) and make note of any familiar tastes that you notice (it’s ok if you don’t notice any or can’t describe them – the more you do this the better you’ll get). Pay attention to acidity (too much will seem tart, not enough will be flabby, and just right will feel lively), tannin (with soft tannins you’ll notice a drying sensation in your mouth, harsh tannins are bitter) and sweetness (does it taste sweet or not? is it too sweet?).

Clearing your palate

You might notice that flavors and aromas become more muted after you’ve been tasting for a while. It’s a bit like tuning out a steady sound – after a while you just don’t notice it. That’s why tasters clear their palate between different wines. A cracker or an apple will give your taste buds something different and “reset” them for the next wine. Sniffing some coffee beans or some such can do the same for your sense of smell.

Isn’t it supposed to be fun?

I know it sounds like a lot of work, but it can really turn something ordinary into an occasion. It isn’t just that you learn more about how wines differ or which ones go with which food, it’s that you have something new to talk about at dinner. Sometimes the Lady of the House and I agree on the wines, and other times it’s as though we were tasting completely different ones. There’s often a surprise and always something to talk about. So spice up your next meal with an easy blind tasting!

Further reading

For a great book on how to taste wine, try How to Taste: A Guide to Enjoying Wine.

Did you know that Chardonnay goes with poached eggs? I didn’t either. It was date night at the Washington Winemaker household, and that meant I needed to select a wine to go with dinner. The Lady of the House decided we were having eggs poached in mushroom soup. This is a new recipe for us from Morrison Wood’s With A Jug Of Wine. A great cookbook for a winemaker that, sadly, is out of print. His more recent Through Europe with a Jug of Wine is available and will probably end up in my library.

The Wine and Food Matcher

Alright, we were both excited about the recipe but what was I going to serve with it? If you can pair wine with breakfast cereal, then eggs ought to be doable. I needed some advice, though, and for that I turned to Natalie MacLean. She’s a respected wine writer and the author of Red, White, and Drunk All Over. The wine and food matcher on her homepage gives you suggested wine pairings if you pick a food or suggests foods for a particular wine.

Would you like Chardonnay with that?

For eggs, it suggested Chardonnay. It just so happens that I’ve been buying a lot of bargain Chardonnay that I really like – it holds it’s own against $15 bottles for a fraction of the price – so I uncorked a bottle. How’d it turn out? The eggs were terrific, so was the wine, and Natalie was right – they were great together.

As to having eggs for dinner, well those of us who think pizza is breakfast food can’t object too loudly …

Once upon a time, food and wine pairing was as simple as, “red wine with meat and white wine with fish.” Then I learned about full bodied whites that can stand up to meat and realized that it can get more complicated. Then I thought about Asian food and chocolate. After some work, I came up with good pairings for them and started to think I was doing pretty well.

Then I came across this video discussing wine pairing with breakfast cereal, and that’s when I gave up! He insists that it’s not a joke and he starts out with his favorite pairing, Cap’n Crunch with a $30 bottle of Riesling, and goes on to discuss two others.

I can’t say I’m convinced, but I know at least one “meal” with wine and cereal is in my future. Once she hears about it, no power in the universe will keep the Lady of the House from trying it. By comparison, it makes my Superbowl wine seem downright respectable – cheers.

Can a good label make your wine taste better? Not in the sense that it alters the chemistry involved in your senses of taste and smell, but your enjoyment of wine is more than chemistry. A California Institute of Technology experiment showed that expectations and psychology have a big impact on how much people enjoy a particular wine: test subjects liked wine better when told it was more expensive. This means we home winemakers need to present and serve our wines with pride if we are to get the most enjoyment out of them.

A good label on a clean bottle, without scuff marks of the previous label on it, is part of that presentation. It should be attractive and informative. An informative label answers questions about it. You don’t have a lot of room on the label so make sure you cover the basics, like “what am I drinking?” and “is it sweet or dry?” If you’re serving to other winemakers, then measurements like specific gravity (SG), titratable acidity (TA), and pH might be important. Attractive labels make people feel good about the wine and want to try it (and if the CIT results can be applied here, make it “taste better”).

The Image: Tell a story

My labels are usually text on artwork. I try to choose artwork that reflects the wine in some way. This relationship between the label and the wine can make a nice story to tell your guests as you serve the wine. That can mean showing the base fruit of the wine on the label – one of my apple wine labels featured a woman eating an apple. It can mean color and mood coming together the way a fun pinup of a woman blushing became the artwork for my “Raspberry Blush” wine. It almost certainly means different things to different people. To me, wine and mead are feminine so most of my labels are too – though I did use a self portrait on my first wine from grapes and the Dharma Initiative logo on a wine I bottled just as a new season of Lost was starting.

The Text: Explain and get them interested

Once I have the artwork, I choose the text style and color to match. Placement is just as important. You don’t want to trample over a beautiful sunset or a pretty smile with boldfaced text. The top and bottom are usually good places, and you can often say a lot on one side or the other without ruining or upstaging the artwork. What do you say? That depends on who you’re serving to. For other winemakers, you might include the basic measurements, the yeast, and other details about how you made it. If you mainly serve mead or unusual wine to friends who are unfamiliar with it, then a short explanation can go a long way. You might say something like, “apple juice and sugar can ferment into a terrific white wine!” or “men have been fermenting honey and water to make mead for centuries.” Remember, you haven’t got a lot of room so keep it short, tell them what they’re drinking, and pique their interest.

If you already make labels for your wine, I’d love to hear about them. If not, give it a try. You might find it’s just the finishing touch to set your wines apart.