Hold a horizontal wine tasting, and create your own wine vocabulary
Two wine links for you today.
First of all, Forbes.com recently had a good article about horizontal wine tastings. These are tastings where all the wines are from the same year. You may want to narrow it even further, the article suggests, sampling wines that are all from the same region and year, to sample variance in taste. For example, the article suggests that you could do a sampling of 2005 Napa cabernets.
A vertical tasting, on the other hand, is one in which you sample different vintages (different years) of the same wine.
Once you taste that wine, you’re going to need to describe it. This article on SouthCoastToday.com suggests that you avoid using standard wine description terms if they don’t have meaning to you - a lot of people can’t relate to words like “tannic,” for example. One taster couldn’t relate to “cherry” tastes in wine, but she did think it “tasted like Luden’s cherry cough drops,” so that’s how she described it. You’ll get more out of your wine tastings if you use your own descriptions, rather than conforming to other people’s standard descriptions.
You’ll also get more out of tastings when you use Mid-South Alcoholic Supply’s wine glasses - thousands to choose from.
