As you may have read in my 7 steps to organizing a fabulous wine tasting -to view click here , it's easy to impress your friends with a few tricks and a little preparation.
You don't need to be a wine expert to show off. Trust me, my friends usually rave about my wine tastings for days and I can tell you I still have a LOT to learn.
So here are a few more tricks to make sure that you too are able to enjoy a great wine tasting.
1. The most important thing you do is select simple wines.
No need to go directly for a Romanée Conti just yet. You may settle for a 5 to 15$ bottle which I'm sure you'll appreciate.
What I suggest you should do, is buy one-varietal wines. It's hard enough to try to understand what the characteristics of Merlot are, so don't bother and buy an intricate assemblage wine ; you'd be completely lost (and worst of all, your guests would be lost too!).
2. Try to go for an all white or an all red tasting.
This will ease up a lot your task. First of all, you will only have so much aromas that you may find in these wines. For example, if you select only white wines, don't even bother to find strawberry or mushroom and stay focused on the typical white wine aromas like orange, lemon, pineapple, honey, nut, litchi, rose or pear.
3. Find stereotypical wines
What I mean by that is that should really try to find wines that display the typical aromas you would usually find in their varietal.
For instance, I would start out with a Chenin wine (not the most famous varietal, as it mostly grows in the Loire Valley in France). Chenin is a white wine that has the characteristic of showing very vivid acidity. So you would know, when tasting one that you would be most likely to end of sensing aromas of orange or citrus.
If your guests (or yourself!) have really never tried wine tasting before, it would probably come in handy to have flavors that are easy to recognize.
4. Buy a little bit of bread or neutral food, for people to chew on when they feel their mouth is starting to get numb.
Also I may add, that it could be useful if one of your guests has not have time to eat before. Once I organized a tasting in a rush and didn't have time to have a decent lunch. Well, I can let you guess that although it was very fun (for me at least), I ended up trying to convince my friends that red wine was actually white wine with tomato juice inside. Yeah, surprisingly enough the people I had invited to that specific tasting never really wanted to try it again ...
If you manage to get all this straight, there is no reason why your wine tasting shouldn't be a great success!
As an example here are the wines I tasted for a beginners wine tasting last week (red and white).
Chenin, Domaine de la taille aux loups, 2008
Vouvray
Pinot Noir, Les bons Ores, 2005
Chorey les Beaunes
Syrah, Domaine Gros, 2007
Minervois
Grenache, Syrah, Domaine de la Citadelle, 2003
Cotes du Lubéron
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