Many people have asked how I conduct my own tastings and this may be as good a time as any to answer that question. In general, I partake in three kinds of tastings - those I hold in my own home six times weekly; professional tastings that I attend with colleagues; and friendly tastings held at wineries, wine shops, restaurants, or at the homes of people kind enough to invite me to share their wines with them. Although I make notes at all tastings (what the heck, I even make notes when I drink wine at a restaurant), my evaluations and scores are based only on tastings held at home or in a professional setting. As much as I enjoy (and Lord knows, I do enjoy) friendly tastings, they are rarely held under conditions ideal for real tastings.

My own at-home tastings are generally scheduled for about ten in the morning, long enough after my morning coffee that my palate is fresh and before I have developed a true sense of hunger. Because I smoke (no apologies will be forthcoming!), I brush my teeth (without tooth paste) immediately before settling in to my tasting. Knowing the wines I have to review or want to re-taste, I give my wife a list of 8 - 10 wines. She opens those bottles without me being present . She also selects and opens 6 - 8 more bottles of wines in the same category. She numbers the bottles and the glasses and then brings the wines to my tasting table in flights of six or seven wines. At least two wines in each tasting are "doubled-up", that is to say, served twice with different numbers. The only wines she decants for me are those with a distinct sediment. In general, like the French, I believe the best way for a wine to breathe is in the glass. Oh yes...glasses.... At formal tastings, I use glasses in Riedel's Sommelier series. I consider the Bordeaux Grand Cru glass (Model 400/0) ideal for tasting most red and white wines (notable exceptions including Champagne, Marsala, Madeira, Sherry and Port).

The room in which I do my tasting is well lit and as odor-free as possible; the only things on the table are my note-pad, sugar-free and salt-free bread, mineral water, a large sheet of blank white paper, and a bucket for spitting. After having tasted and having made my notes of every wine in each flight, I push those glasses to the back and start on the next flight, this giving me the freedom, towards the end of the tasting, of returning to whichever wines I want to re-taste. By the end of the tasting, my note-pads contain all of my impressions of the wine and the score I have awarded them, and only then do I compare the glasses to the bottles, inserting the names of the wines I have tasted.

Critical to my formal tastings is a comparison of the scores I have awarded to the wines that have been "doubled-up". If my scores for those wines vary by more than three points, I discard my tasting notes for the entire morning, that discrepancy indicating that my palate, my nose or my mood was not in (shall we say) "prime condition", and arrange a similar tasting in the following days.

To Read My Comments on the Value of Wine Scores, Click Here

© Daniel Rogov