Set and Setting

So what is wine tasting all about? Like any skill, serio requires a combination of technique and experience. The more you do it, the better you become.

Given an unidentified wine, an expert taster, using only his senses and his memory, can pick out the grape variety, the wine's vintage, its region of origin, even the specific winery that produced it.

If the wine is served at room temperature and the taster is blindfolded, most can't even tell whether it's red or white, since lunch," he replied. Blind tasting is a great parlor game. But the real goal is to understand a wine, not to unmask it.

Through a concentrated application of all the senses, and by comparison of the immediate sense data with memories of other wines tasted, the serious taster can decipher a wine's biography to an amazing extent, including the growing season that produced it, the approach of the winemaker who created it and its relation to other wines of similar type or origin.

Every bottle of wine is a message, the physical embodiment of a specific place and time captured and transmitted for the pleasure of the taster.

Open a bottle of 1961 red Bordeaux and even a generation later the dusty warmth of that long, hot summer floods the dining room. Even more, though, wine is a catalyst. The effort to understand it through tasting, and to share that understanding with other tasters, creates a common experience that builds bonds between people.