Written by Matthew Sullivan | 12 March 2010

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Educating yourself about wine has many advantages. For instance, it gives you one more reason to look down upon Australians. Also, learned discourse about wine is an excellent way to bore your relatives. But the most important benefit of memorizing the 1855 Bordeaux classification is that it’s naturally intimidating. I just have to mumble something about gravel soil types and my friends begin squirming like worms dangling from a hook. As that great lover of wine Emperor Caligula once said, “Let them hate me, so long as they fear me.”

But there is one thing about wine that everybody dreads, and connoisseurs most of all: blind tastings. They are unavoidable in the wine world. Tasting blind is not merely the best way of assessing a bottle’s quality — it is a public ritual contrived to expose ignorance and shatter pride. Horror stories about these tastings are a particularly amusing sub-genre of wine writing. For instance, there is the tale of the tasting panel at the famous 1976 Judgment of Paris, whose members bickered throughout the proceedings about which samples were French and which American. More recently, a study of judges at the California State Fair’s prestigious wine competition found that only 10% of them gave the same wine the same rating when it was given to them blind on more than one occasion. Some judges failed a certain sample on one day, and the next day handed it a gold medal.

Everyone has their own miserable story. I was recently at a dinner with the Board of Directors of the Toronto Wine Tasters Society, a club that masochistically specializes in drinking blind. The half-dozen directors communally possess about 250 years of experience with fine wine and some of them have won awards for their ability to pinpoint a bottle in the dark. Yet this evening, after nosing and slurping an anonymous bottle, no one at the table correctly guessed that it was a Chardonnay or that it was from California, the single most popular varietal from the single most popular region in the North American market.

How do you get good at blind tasting? If you think that you can improve through practice and experience, then I have bad news for you. Many wine writers believe that experience actually makes you less accurate. In her memoir, Tasting Pleasure (1997), Jancis Robinson says, “I have never been as good at identifying wines as I was in the late 1970s when my palate memory (and actual memory) were uncluttered by accumulation … Then, as we accumulate more experience, more impressions and increasingly discover exceptions to the rules that seemed so simple at first, our poor old palates and memories become increasingly befuddled.”

Some people believe that that the best wine tasters are genetically different than the rest of us, with better noses and more sensitive tongues. Robert Parker has claimed that he has a “privileged” sensory capacity, and as a result, he has insured his nose for $1,000,000 in case it should ever come to harm. But the science here is iffy. Physiologists are still trying to understand the way humans perceive flavour, but one fact seems to be clear: it isn’t our nose or our tongue that does the heavy lifting when it comes to wine tasting — it is the brain. It is true that experiments have identified some people as so-called supertasters, who have a heightened capacity to detect flavours because they possess more taste buds. But apparently supertasters aren’t any better at tasting wine — in fact, the tannic bitterness and alcoholic heat can overwhelm and repulse them.

If experience doesn’t help and neither does biology, a wine lover has only two defences when confronted with a blind tasting. The first of these is dumb luck. The second is having the good sense to widely publicize it when you do manage to guess correctly. Bernard Ginestet, a former owner of Château Margaux, once said, “I know of tasters who live by a reputation forged on the basis of two or three inspired guesses.”

If even seasoned professionals wince at tasting blind, imagine how terrifying they are for a hack such as myself. Therefore, you can understand my jitters when I was invited to a blind tasting of premium Pinot Noir by the Lifford Wine Agency in Toronto. They set it up like a game, with the 20 or so tasters competing to correctly identify the country of origin of each bottle. After all, what could be more fun than embarrassing yourself in front of a large audience of industry professionals and journalistic peers?