If you get drunk at a wine tasting you’re doing it wrong. There’s a spit bowl for a reason.
I regularly travel to visit wine-production regions (e.g. last fall I was in Bordeaux for a week). On a typical day I’ll visit three or four wineries, tasting four to six wines at each. I never even get buzzed.
Too late to edit the above to add a further thought: There are, indeed, people who get drunk tasting wine, and they are, indeed, doing it wrong.
Many years ago, on a visit to the Napa region, I was at a winery in the late afternoon. A trio of middle-aged women came in, laughing loudly and staggering, and took a place further down the tasting bar. The winery employee who had been pouring for me glanced at them and sighed.
I commented that it was unfortunate; they were sufficiently drunk that they probably wouldn’t be able to appreciate what they were tasting. The employee said it was always like this on weekend afternoons; he greatly preferred serving the people who came to taste in the morning, because they were more serious about the wine, but then as the days continued to wear on, the visitors would get drunker and more obnoxious, and his job got less and less fun.
I’ve kept that in mind ever since, and have made a conscious effort to emphasize patience and courtesy when I’m visiting a winery in the latter part of the afternoon. It does seem to make a difference with the quality of service and attention I receive.
Oh, I wasn’t even thinking of someone getting drunk. I figured they specifically didn’t, to be able to know the wine. I assumed people were there to figure out what wine they might purchase not to party it up.
Good grief.
OK. I interpreted this as a question about getting buzzed after so much wine that they start to blur together:
All I can say is, thirty years of experience has inevitably produced knowledge and skill, simply through practice and repetition. At this point I already know what I’m likely to buy, because I’m pre-selecting wine regions and specific wineries based on what I know about them, and I have a rough shopping list in my head before I even show up. I’m tasting because I’m still trying to learn the fine details — doing single-vineyard verticals, comparing year to year, that kind of thing.
Also, at this point, the challenge is pretty fun. When we were in Bordeaux, we went to one of the restaurants that does a blind wine course. With each successive plate, they give you a glass, and don’t tell you what it is; then they come back later and ask you about it. The first glass they gave us was a white, conventionally dry, but with an oddly pronounced flintiness. I told the server I was pretty sure it was a Pinot gris from Alsace, but there was something about it I couldn’t place. He said I was right, and the unusual character was because it was from the German side instead of the French side. Then, with the second course, the glasses he brought me diverged from what he was giving the rest of the table, uncommon choices intended to throw me off. It worked, too. The final glass with dessert was particularly baffling; it turned out to be an apple wine from Poland.
When you’re a wine nerd, this kind of game is wildly entertaining. Just trust me. 
You might be skeptical that these slight distinctions can be discerned, glass to glass, especially after a long day when your palate gets tired, but like I said, time and experience develops the necessary skills. I would compare it to any other similar discipline. Like, I don’t know the first thing about bird-watching. I can identify the boldly distinctive birds like blue jays and magpies, but beyond that, one little brown bird is just like any other little brown bird. An expert, though, can spend all day peering through his or her binoculars, rattling off identifications at a glance. I might raise an eyebrow at their confidence in instantly distinguishing a male gray-throated house sparrow from a female brown-tailed song sparrow* but the expert really does know.
*I made these up. Like I said, I don’t know anything about birds. But if you put a glass of Amarone and a glass of Margaux in front of me without telling me which is which, the difference will be night and day.
All that said, there is evidence experts get their wines completely wrong quite often.
Although, I do recall seeing an episode of the British TV show “The F-Word” with Gordon Ramsay and he had a wine expert on the show who seemed to know every wine they gave him with remarkable accuracy (presumably it was a blind taste test and not arranged off camera).
Wow! Thanks. Very interesting.
I know certain things because I just do. I could not explain them half as well as you two did.
OMG, thank you! I was racking my brain trying to figure out how a prop master could have scripted such a scene and coming up empty.
Suit yourself, but I can tell a lot about what a wine will taste like by sniffing the cork. The bouquet is much more intense than it is in the glass, probably because it’s held much closer to the nose, and this is particularly true before the wine has had a chance to breathe.
I’ve been to many wine tastings at dozens of local wineries and have never seen a “spit bowl”. Maybe it’s a French winery thing? I’ve also never gotten anywhere close to drunk at a wine tasting, probably because the quantities are so small. We typically visit only three or four wineries on each trip and typically sample only three or four wines at each one. The total amount of wine consumed might amount to one or two glasses at most. I’ve also been to prix fixe winery lunches that are typically four or five courses with a matching wine for each course. I don’t get buzzed on that, either, again because the quantities are intentionally fairly small.
I’m skeptical of this and I suspect that a lot of it is due to self-styled “experts” who really aren’t. The last straw was when I read somewhere that in a literally blind taste test where the judges couldn’t see what they were drinking, these “experts” couldn’t even distinguish red wine from white. That’s just nonsense. You don’t even have to be a trained sommelier to be able to fairly reliably tell things like what region a wine comes from; you just need years of experience.
In general I don’t believe experts can accurately determine things like the actual vintage year of a wine, but there are exceptions. One local winery produced such a fantastic Cabernet Franc one year that it was head and shoulders above everything that came before and after. There was no mistaking it. They sold it at their normal price which made it an incredible value while it lasted.
The same was true for a very inexpensive Spanish Tempranillo a few years ago. I read a rave review about it extolling the virtues of this one particular year, saying it was easily worth three or four times the price, but that sadly most of the stock was sold out, and the more recent vintage was just ordinary – worth the low price, but no more than that. I bought a bottle anyway, and when I tried it I was amazed – how could anyone say this was just “ordinary”? I went back and checked the review again, and I had misremembered the year. This was the good stuff!
Over the next few months I scoured the liquor stores and bought up all the bottles of that vintage I could find, which were intermittently available if you knew what to look for. Which just goes to show that even we rank amateurs can tell, not only the difference between similar wines, but sometimes the difference between vintage years of the same wine.
In France I encountered a wallet-sized cheat sheet, and later an app, which had all the regions and vintages on it, indicating which were OK, which exceptional, which poor, and so on.
Not wine - but I once went on a tour of the Hennessy Distillery in Cognac. We were given an introductory talk, along with a small taste and then a tour of the caves. At the end (obviously to encourage purchases) there was more tasting.
Some members of our party didn’t want theirs, so I felt obliged to help them out… I have no recollection of the rest of the day
I don’t like the taste of wine but I live in wine country and I’ve been the designated driver on lots of wine tasting tours. There definitely are spit buckets in Central Coast California wineries.
Wine science is super interesting. It’s all about microclimates. There will be a little crag in Los Olivos that will have a very similar elevation, yearly temperature profile and soil to, say, Pinot Grigio so that’s what they’ll choose to plant there.
My ex wife and her friends would have wine tasting parties that would rotate between houses and I’d hang out when it would be at ours. There’d be like eight bottles of wine consumed and no spit buckets. They’d be pretty toasty at the end. Everyone had a little notebook where they’d rate each bottle and make comments. The labels of the bottles would be covered. It wasn’t like they could tell that it was a three year old Syrah accurately but the consensus at the end of the night on what were best ones and why generally matched.
Proper service is opening it at the table, no human being knows if it’s been corked until that moment and it’s left to the purchaser to decide if it has.
The display identifies a taster of quality, a classy production by the staff, and serves some purpose in smoothing over any difficulties to a delightful evening.
But you think they should just know because?
I just wanted to add that it occurs to me that the winery sold that fantastic vintage at the same regular price as always simply because they had to, and not out of some altruistic generosity. Wine prices aren’t regulated per se, but all kinds of rules are involved if the government liquor stores carry a wine. One rule is that wineries have to be able to provide a certain minimum supply, even for the limited “Vintages” section of the stores. And I’m sure that the contract includes a price agreement so that wineries can’t arbitrarily fiddle with pricing. Another rule is that if the liquor stores carry a wine product, then wineries must charge the same set price when selling through their own store.
The “minimum supply” rule means that most wineries have dozens of limited-production wines made in small batches that aren’t available anywhere else, and this is what makes shopping at wineries so interesting. .Some smaller wineries don’t supply the liquor stores at all and their products are only available directly from them. The ability to sample these exclusive wines and then buy a few bottles that strike your fancy, along with a nice lunch on some winery’s patio, is a great way to spend a summer afternoon.
I doubt we will agree on this.
I have seen it said that sniffing the cork can let some know if the cork is bad. I am dubious but maybe.
If you want to smell the wine, smell the wine. Smelling the cork is wine + cork. You will not get a great bouquet of the wine from it. Have a little wine poured in the glass, swirl it, tilt the glass (enough to get the wine near the lip of the glass) and stick your nose in the glass and take a deep whiff. That’s the wine. That’s what you want to smell (I think).
If you like smelling the cork then fer sure…keep doing that. I doubt it makes a lot of difference in the end as long as we enjoy drinking the wine.
Yes, but for people who are familiar with the tradition, the only acceptable reason to send the wine back is if it is corked. If you send the wine back because you merely don’t like it, you probably won’t receive any pushback but among a certain class of people, you’ll be marked as déclassé.
Depending on how much you want to buy into the class signalling aspects of the ritual (and it’s become largely vestigial and purely now a class signalling mechanism), the class signal you want to send is that you want to perform the minimal amount of due diligence possible to ensure that the wine is not corked but anything beyond that is an affront to the restaurant that you don’t trust them to properly manage their wines. The time to actually sniff and enjoy the wine and do all that is after the somm has left the table.
I think you misunderstood my comment.
By all means check to see if the wine is corked and, if it is, send it back.
I am merely saying smelling the cork is not really the best route to do that. Smell the wine itself. Also, you can inspect the cork to see if it is in good shape. Smelling the wine, as noted by @wolfpup above, is probably the surest means to discern if the wine is corked. But, smell the wine, not the cork.
You keep saying that as if it’s indisputable sage advice. It isn’t. There’s a reason the sommelier puts the cork on the table in front of the customer. My ritual is quick and simple and inconveniences no one – a quick look at the cork, and a sniff of the cork which hopefully has absorbed some wine due to having been properly stored on its side, and provides a delightful preview of what the wine will taste like. Then a taste of the wine itself.
Rituals are problematic only if they keep the sommelier waiting around needlessly, because that violates basic courtesy. My little ritual doesn’t. I couldn’t care less about “signaling” anything, but for anyone who does, ignoring the cork that the sommelier has put in front of you for the express purpose of allowing you to examine it signals that you don’t know what to do with it.
Yes…inspect the cork. If it is in bad shape that can be a clue to a bad bottle.
Smelling the cork is smelling cork and some wine that has permeated it. Why on earth would you think that is a better route to determining if the wine is bad rather than actually smelling the wine? It’s no “preview” of the wine. It is cork-and-wine giving you no clue to the final result because cork is not part of the wine and the cork smell will overpower any aroma the wine has.
Just smell the wine. There’s your preview.
It’s not better, it’s in addition to it.
What happens if, they’ve opened the wine at your table, handed you the cork and it’s “corked” or you smell that fungus stuff. Then you say “nope not drinking it” or ever how you say it. Who, now is responsible for paying for that bottle of frou frou undrinkable wine?
Or is this why all kitchen staff are drunk all the time?(facetiously said)
Seriously, who’s responsible for it. Especially if it’s a very expensive bottle.