Blind tasting is a very odd activity. Contrary to what many imagine, it has nothing to do with blindfolds. It involves tasting a wine without seeing the label and it can deliver shocking surprises. I tasted seven non-vintage champagnes blind with a group of professionals recently. There was horror when they discovered the wine most of them preferred carried a label they regarded as their least favourite. That sort of result is especially common with champagne, arguably the most image-driven – rather than quality-driven – wine of all. But it happens all the time when wine is tasted blind.
Because I’m interested in how wines really taste as opposed to how I think they should, I taste wine blind as often as I can, especially when assessing similar young wines. But blind tasting when you know absolutely nothing about the wine in front of you is something completely different. The notoriously difficult Master of Wine exams include three sessions during which you have a dozen glasses in front of you and nothing more helpful than a printed exam paper asking you to identify each wine as closely as possible, and assess its quality.
Now that the MW is behind me, I taste wine completely blind only very rarely, and never in public. (When I started out in wine everyone expected me to get it wrong and noticed only when I got it right – today the reverse is true.) So my blind tastings these days are round the dinner table with good friends – and once a year when I act as a judge, with Hugh Johnson, in the Oxford v Cambridge wine-tasting competition.