Blind Wine Tasting: What It Is and Why It Works
What blind wine tasting is, the different types, how to reason your way to grape, region and price without a label, and why it teaches you most. Try it.
Blind wine tasting means tasting a wine without knowing what it is: bottle covered, no label, no price and no clues. All you have is what's in the glass. It lets you judge a wine for what it is rather than what you think it is, which makes it the best way to learn to taste and the most fun way to test yourself.
What exactly is blind wine tasting?
It's a normal tasting (look, smell, sip) with one rule: you don't know what you're drinking. Not the producer, not the grape, not the region, not the price. At the end, if you like, you unwrap and check.
It's how wines are judged in competitions and how sommeliers are examined. Not out of snobbery, but because it's the only way to stop the label getting a vote.
The types of blind tasting
Not all blind tastings are equally hard:
| Type | What you know | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|
| Single blind | Which wines are in the line-up, but not which glass is which | Low: you can rule things out |
| With a clue | One clue: the grape, the country or the price range | Medium |
| Double blind | Nothing: not which wines, not the order | High |
To start, single blind is perfect: you have a list and match them up. Double blind is the final exam.
Why blind tasting strips away your prejudices
Anyone who has run a blind tasting has seen it happen. The wine everyone praised with the label in view ends up mid-table. The cheap one nobody would have ordered in a restaurant wins. And the table's expert can't even get the country right.
It's not that people lie. It's that the label, the price and the reputation change what you expect, and what you expect changes what you notice. If you know a wine is expensive, you look for its virtues. If you know it's cheap, you look for its faults. Read "notes of blackcurrant" and you'll find blackcurrant.
Cover the bottle and all of that disappears. Two things happen:
- You find out what you really like. Not what you were told you should like.
- You actually learn. Without the label, you have to link what you notice to what the wine is. That memory is what makes a good taster.
How to reason through a blind tasting
Identifying a wine blind isn't magic or a superhero nose: it's deduction. Like a detective, you gather clues and rule out suspects. The method, stage by stage:
- Sight tells you age and concentration. A purple rim suggests a young wine; an orange one, an older wine. A very deep colour hints at a thick-skinned grape or a warm climate.
- The nose tells you the grape and the oak. The fruit (red, black, citrus, tropical) and its nuances point to the variety. Vanilla, coconut or toast give away the barrel.
- The palate tells you the climate. High acidity usually means a cool climate; high alcohol and ripe fruit, a warm one. Tannin separates one grape from another.
- Put the clues together and decide. Grape, region, country and, hardest of all, price.
An example: red, deep colour with a purple rim, lots of black fruit and pepper, medium acidity, firm tannin. Young, from a warm or temperate climate, a thick-skinned grape with spicy notes... Syrah or Monastrell join the list of suspects.
Most important of all: commit. In blind tasting, leaving it blank never scores; taking a chance sometimes does.
How to do a blind tasting at home
It's simpler than it sounds:
- Cover the bottles with tin foil, paper bags or clean socks, neck included.
- Number them after shuffling, ideally done by someone else, so even you don't know which is which.
- Pour a little into matching glasses: a finger or two.
- Write before you speak. One word said out loud spreads round the whole table.
- Unwrap at the end, never before.
If you don't want to buy and cover the wines, there's another option: have them arrive already covered.
Blind tasting as a game: how Winegang works
Winegang is exactly this, turned into a competition. Every month a box arrives with four samples of different wines, covered and marked with a letter (A, B, C and D). On your phone, with nothing to install, you answer stage by stage, and every answer scores:
| Stage | What you guess | Points |
|---|---|---|
| Sight | Intensity and colour | 3 |
| Smell | Intensity and primary, secondary and tertiary aromas | 8 |
| Taste | Sweetness, acidity, tannin, body and finish | 5 |
| Final | Grape (12), region (5), price (4) and country (3) | 24 |
Up to 40 points per wine and 160 a month. Wrong answers don't lose points, so it pays to take a risk: half a line of reasoning beats an empty box. And a tip from the house: if the wine has no oak or ageing aromas, the right answer is "none". A young Albariño has never seen a barrel in its life, and if you give it vanilla, you lose the points.
You can play on your own or in a gang, and the results come out on the 1st of each month. To see how the game works inside, have a look at the FAQ.
What blind tasting teaches you
Your first blind tasting is usually a small lesson in humility. The second, a challenge. From the third on, you start noticing things you never saw before: that sharp acidity points north, that black fruit with pepper isn't a coincidence, that expensive doesn't always win. That's when you stop tasting labels and start tasting wine. And then all you need is someone to prove it against.
FAQ
Why do people taste wine blind?
To judge the wine on what's in the glass rather than what's on the label. It's how wine competitions and sommelier exams work, and it's the most honest way to find out whether you really like a wine.
Is it hard to identify a wine blind?
Naming the exact wine is next to impossible. Getting the grape, the country or the style can be learned with practice and method. That's why tasting games score each part separately: you always pick up something.
What is a double-blind wine tasting?
One where the taster knows nothing about the wines: not which ones there are, nor the order. It's the toughest kind, because there's no list to rule things out from.