Wine & spirits: Blind tasting

Everyone's an expert at choosing a favourite wine. We drink with our eyes. One look at the label, and many of us decide right away whether we'll like a wine or not. Cute kangaroos hopping across a label – good. Lots of dense, tiny writing with strange, unpronounceable words like Gewurztraminer, Viognier or Zweigelt – bad. So what happens when your favourite wine goes undercover? Would you be able to identify
it among a group of strangers? Let's find out.

How to set up a blind tasting
Setting up a wine tasting is as easy as organizing a party. All you need are some sealed bottles and a group of friends with open minds.

Keep it simple. Limit the number of tasters to a comfortable six or eight and the number of wines to, say, four to six reds, each from a different country. For example, you could include a Merlot from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, France and Italy. Remove all plastic or metal capsules and wrap each bottle in a brown paper bag to hide any clue as to its identity. Ask a guest to shuffle the bagged bottles and another guest to number each one. The wines are now ready for tasting, as no one knows which is which. Cover the table with white paper or a white tablecloth to make it easier to assess each wine's colour nuances. Arrange identical stemmed wineglasses at each place setting and number the bases with a grease pencil.

Provide each guest with a glass of water, a piece of paper and a pencil. Then pour a few ounces of each wine into its correspondingly numbered glass. Invite your guests to take a few minutes to inspect, smell and taste each wine, then to write down their first impressions. Does each wine look the same? Is one darker than the rest? Smell the wine. Is the wine's bouquet fruity, floral, vegetative, woody, nutty, earthy, spicy or chemical? If fruity, is it more like strawberry, blueberry, raspberry, cherry, cranberry, blackberry or black currant? Is the texture thick and mouth coating or squeaky clean and refreshing? Most important, do you like it? Finally, ask your guests to rank each wine from best to worst, and to take a guess at its origin. Once everyone is finished, the chatter begins!