7 Reasons Why Blind Tasting Wine Tests for Sommeliers are Pointless, Wasteful, and Should Be Abolished

Ah, the ego-inflating fun of blind tasting. It’s an excuse to create a “study group” dedicated to drinking a small fortune in wine, and then engage in a practice of one-upsmanship with your drinking buddies. It’s the perfect tool for show-off personality types to assert their wine-smarty dominance.

Wine without context is sterile, heartless, meaningless.

Got a wine-chip on your shoulder? Get to work nerding-out on wine, and soon you’ll be able to show everyone who ever doubted you that you are a genius at something. The wine-geeks shall inherit the terroir!

But besides these vainglorious pursuits, are there any other, dare I say "practical," applications of blind tasting?

So far I haven’t heard of any. In fact, there are lots of reasons why blind tasting is basically pointless, or worse... and here they are:

1. Blind Tasting Removes the Context of the Wine, and Context is Everything

Blind tasting intentionally strips a wine of every aspect of the cultures, moods, and occasions in which it naturally occurs. There is virtually never an instance in the world, unless deliberately contrived, where normal consumers replicate this practice. That is, wine is naturally always drunk in the context of a culture, a mood, and an occasion. These contexts have profound influence on the perception of the wine being drunk. They help us appreciate it better, enjoy it more, and understand it with greater insight. Wine without context is sterile, heartless, meaningless. Why try to learn about wine in a way that the people you sell it to would never experience?

Here's a better use of the money and time you'd spend training for a blind tasting exam: go visit at least five wine growing regions, drink the wine, and eat and talk with the people who make it.

2. Blind Tasting Attempts to Make Subjective Taste Objective

Taste – what you perceive – is subjective, as are taste preferences – what you enjoy. Yes, there is general agreement about many aspects of many wines. But this may not always be due to the objective nature of a wine’s taste, but because by the time sommeliers have risen to the upper levels of certification their original perceptions have been beaten out of them. If you ask beginning tasters about the fruit and non-fruit smells they perceive in, say, an old vine Grenache from Minervois, and not suggest a “correct” answer, you will not get a lot of agreement – with each other or with the current “correct” understanding of this type of wine.

So what somms often learn about is not wine, but the language of certification. Essentially somms are being trained to speak homogeneously about wine– not perceive objective tastes. Unfortunately, no one else speaks that language, especially the people to whom we are trying to sell wine, and that language seldom helps the consumer enjoy the wine more or want to buy more of it.

3. Blind Tasting Creates Wine Detectives Rather Than People Detectives

Following from the two above reasons, its important to add that the practice of blind tasting is antithetical to the theoretical aims of training sommeliers – i.e. to make them better wine sellers and servers. Blind tasting is deductive. You quickly eliminate and reduce possibilities so that you can narrow your identification down to a specific wine. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it builds the wrong muscles for a somm working the floor. To serve and sell better, we should be trained to listen better and ask better questions of the customer, not of the wine.

4. Blind Tasting is Anti-Innovative

To be able to continually accurately identify wine via blind tasting, wine styles must remain somewhat constant. While stability is important to the wine business, innovation is just as vital – and becoming more so (see below). Again, this seems to be at odds with one of the key goals of the sommelier – to shed light on lesser known, newer, interesting wines of quality. Instead, blind tasting lends itself to the old standards, because they have a sameness that is predictably identifiable. But what about being surprised? Isn’t that one of the true joys of drinking wine? Surprising wines are necessarily hard to identify blind.

The future of winemaking is innovation. New breeds of grapes will be developed continually to adapt to changing micro and macro climates, as well as to deal with new grape pests and diseases. These new breeds of grapes will be hybrids of current standards, as well as hybrids of hybrids that are already obscure – like Corot Noir – which will make them even more obscure. How important is it for blind tasting to keep up with the pace of these changes? My prediction is that the practice of blind tasting will quickly become overwhelmed (in fact, I think it is already). Rather than abandon the practice, though, it will become reductive – focusing on the classics – and deprive these new innovations of their much needed, and deserved, attention.

At that point blind tasting may not only be pointless but also detrimental to the wine industry.

5. Wine Flaws Are What Sommeliers Should Be Able to Blind Identify, Not Wines

When it comes to customer service, the number one skill that sommeliers should develop is the ability to detect a flawed bottle of wine. It’s a bit ridiculous that young somms can blind identify some of the classic wines without knowing TCA when they smell it (or even what TCA means). I have witnessed this more than once. Other wine faults can be more subjective, and some would argue they are not faults. But this is precisely why somms should be able to identify them. You should be able to tell a customer that a wine has high H2S, VA, or Bret. Some customers may not care, but some definitely do. If you want to provide great service, teach somms to be experts in wine flaws, not blind tasting.

6. Blind Tasting Is A Mis-Use of Sommelier Resources

Young, aspiring sommeliers are generally not wealthy. The practice of becoming good at blind tasting takes a significant amount of time and money. To achieve the aims of the Court, to provide a global standard of excellence for beverage service, I believe the practice of blind tasting should be abandoned, except as a fun diversion. Quit asking for students of wine to mis-spend their precious time and money. Instead, require all candidates to work a commercial harvest and make10 gallons of their own wine. The knowledge gained from these two tasks would revolutionize their wine knowledge, not to mention give them a few stories to share table-side.

7. You Can’t Blind Taste Some of Wine’s Most Important Characteristics

So much more important than what a wine smells and feels like is how it was grown. By that I mean specifically whether it was grown using biodynamic and organic practices, or whether it is has been sprayed with carcinogenic and environmentally toxic pesticides. More and more it is vital that we distinguish between wines that promote a healthy environment and those that don’t. While these differences can at times be tasted in the wine, they are not looked for; however, these are probably the most important differences between quality wines.

Are there differences between wine flavors and aromas? Absolutely. Do they tell you something about where and when and how and with what it was made? Indeed. Does deciphering all of those details from a blind sniff and sip help anyone? Nope.

There are many more important aspects of wine knowledge on which sommeliers should focus. Wines don’t wander around in the wild naked, devoid of labels and context. They are purchased and delivered in bottles with lots of relevant information, and you can, and should, research them thoroughly. Spend your time on that research, rather than on blind tasting.

Adam Huss