Hip Tastes Blog

This all went down a couple of Saturdays ago at my first Saturday School class, "Blind Tasting Bootcamp." Bootcamp was the first in a series of small, focused classes I've started teaching at SF wine bar Vino Venue on Saturday afternoons. I've had a lot of folks ask me at my bigger, monthly wine parties (see hiptastes.com) where they can learn about wine in a more focused setting, and, as you can imagine, after enough inquiries like this I decided there's enough demand to start offering such small, focused classes on my own.

Blind tasting is tough!
At Bootcamp I walked a great group of 8 "students" through the fundamentals of blind tasting technique, focusing on the three main axes of tasting - a wine's appearance, aroma and taste. Things were going swimmingly, in fact, for the first couple of wines. I'd selected five key varietal wines (three whites, two reds) with which to teach blind tasting technique; I decided it would be better to teach folks about identifying major varietal characteristics with some solid examples in front of them before ultimately moving on to blind taste a sixth wine. We wound up tasting this last wine in teams, with folks competing against each other to see who won (both teams did swimmingly, correctly guessing the variety).

But first, back to the lesson. When it came to the third wine in the day's lineup, I floundered hugely. "Hugely," in fact, doesn't even do justice to the magnitude of my screw up. The wine was a Chardonnay, and, having previously tasted two relatively unoaked whites (a stainless steel fermented Sauv Blanc and a neutral wood-raised Gewurztraminer) I immediately launched into my "now it's time to taste an oaky Chardonnay for comparison" talk. I went on and ON - seriously for quite some time - about how the pendulum is swinging back for oaked Chards and how people are accepting them again, and how the wine in their glass was really quite oaky.

Yes, I even put my nose into the glass and believed, really truly thought, that I smelled lots of pungent oak on the wine. Minutes later I was utterly dumbfounded when a student (my own sister, as a matter of fact) read the label on the bottle and said, "but wait! it says 'No Oak'!" And, sure enough, right there on the label the wine said "No Oak." Turns out it was one of the new in-vogue unoaked Chards, and I, as the "expert" in the room, looked like a complete and utter sham for having misidentified it as an oaked wine. At that moment if there had been a way to switch places with a floor tile I would've done it in a heartbeat. Instead I just stared at my sister, not quite believing that everyone in the room had stopped breathing.

Can I please disappear?
Minutes passed with no one saying anything. It was what you might call a moment of professional crisis. Here I was, the expert, waxing on and on about how to identify oak in a white wine when there was, in fact, absolutely no oak on the wine we were tasting. I put my nose back in the glass and took a quick sniff and, yes, I had to admit, it was really rather un-oaky. The room was silent. My face was bright red. I was in a state of complete and utter panic.

And then, somehow, I recovered. It was quite perfect that it had been my sister who "outed" me, who called out the "no oak" thing. She was the first one to see the bottle, and she didn't even hesitate to point it out. She was, in fact, totally shocked too and admitted later that she said it without even realizing that doing so was tantamount to showing me to be a total sham. Had it been one of my other students it would have been horrible, by comparison. That it was my own sister made it a little better (just a bit!).

Why did it happen? In preparing for my first class - my first real, focused educational series on tasting - I was caught up in a million tiny details (attendance, the venue, stemware, print materials), and, ironically, the wine was really the last thing I was thinking about. Sure, I'd tasted all the wines prior to the class, but I've got to admit in retrospect that I had been in a bit of a hurry. The Chard WAS, looking back, very rich on the nose in spite of its un-oakiness. And I'd been searching for an oaky Chardonnay and I think I simply projected this quality onto the wine (it was a warm climate California Chard). I was in a hurry, and I made a mistake. A HUGE mistake.

Humility all the way
Back to the class. How, exactly, did I recover? With a LOT of humility and by confronting the issue head-on. Once I'd apologized profusely to everyone for my glaring error, I talked about how my mistake actually underscored the reason we blind taste. People project all kinds of things onto wines, and it's for this very reason that we taste blindly. You drinking an oaky Chardonnay? Great! Can't you just smell all that caramelized oak? Oh wait, that's a Viognier. Bang - you've tripped yourself up. You have to taste blindly in order to TRULY identify a wine's characteristics. Otherwise it's so tough that can find yourself smelling and tasting things you WANT to be in there (e.g. grapefruit for Sauv Blanc, cigar box for Cab) when, really, sometimes they just aren't there.

I'm beyond relieved and thrilled that things wound up really positively in the class. After a rocky few minutes I managed to convince the students that I was, in fact, fairly competent and the class proceeded smoothly. In fact, it actually turned out to be a pretty big success. The students really learned blind tasting technique, evidenced in their correctly identifying the final wine in the blind tasting competition (it was a Northern Rhone Syrah - both teams guessed Australian Shiraz, but - hey - nailing the variety's not bad for a first time go at it!). And I felt like the experience might have even upped my credibility with them, in a weird way.

Looking back, it's completely possible I might've just not recovered from my error. But, by plodding on and doing a good job with the rest of the class - showing them that I wasn't really a sham - I think I gained their respect. At least, that's what I'd like to believe! Four of them showed up at my next HIP TASTES tasting in the city, so I think that's a pretty good indication they don't think I'm chopped liver!

Lesson learned
And at the end of the day I learned a great lesson. It is, quite simply, that we all fuck up sometimes. Heck, sometimes we REALLY fuck up. Like, hugely. But, turns out that everybody screws up sometimes, and it's really more about the way that you handle yourself when it happens than anything really specific about the screw up. I also found out that screwing up BIG TIME has the advantage of netting you lots of empathy. I even had one of my most uptight friends relate to me later after he caught wind of the incident, "heck, I screw up all the time!" - something I NEVER thought I'd hear come out of his mouth.

From one perfectionist to another, it was pretty sweet to hear. Now, back to blind tasting. Clearly, I've still got a lot of learning to do. Any good sommelier will tell you the same.

PS here I am with my sis at my Green organic wine tasting last week - still friends. But if she ever calls me out again like that...