A Sensuous Wine Tasting Party

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Anyone can embrace wine tasting at a party designed to stimulate guests' senses and arouse their palates. Set out bowls of ingredients like berries or apples, to assist guests in detecting the aromatic notes that wine pros always reference. After this party, even the first-time wine drinker will taste the cherries, or licorice lingering in that evening's vintage.

Prepping Your Wine Tasting Party:
Pairing Wine with Priming Ingredients

The "Wine & Priming Ingredient Match-Up" is a list of some excellent priming ingredients to be paired with popular varietals.

Some ingredients will serve as primers for a couple of wines, such as apples, which can be used for many white wines, or blackberries, suitable for many red wines. Although I've only chosen six types of wine, the primer ingredients listed should work with similar varietals.

Wine & Priming Ingredient Match-Up

• Chardonnay: butter, vanilla, apple, pear, charred oak, toasted almonds, caramel, peaches
   
• Sauvignon Blanc: pineapple, apple, fresh grass or wheat grass, nectarines, melon, orange slices, apricot jam, jasmine blossoms

• Pinot Grigio/Gris: lemon peel, white pepper, honey, straw, peaches, grapefruit, rose petals

• Cabernet Sauvignon: black peppercorns, blackberries, dark chocolate, currant jam, black licorice, cloves, cinnamon

• Merlot: blackberries, plum jam, cherries, boysenberry jam, milk chocolate, espresso beans, fresh mint

• Syrah/Shiraz: blackberries, violets, strawberry jam, cedar chips, mushrooms, tea leaves

Wine Tasting Notes

Tasting notes will help you determine the priming ingredients you're going to set out at the party.

Tasting notes can usually be found on the winemaker's website, or search for the particular bottle at an online store like Ambrosiawines.com and GeerWade.com.

Make sure that you'll have a few bottles of both red and white wine for a nice variety. After the tasting, invite guests to pick up their favorite bottles of wine and join you at the dinner table, while conversations of toasted oak and rich, fruit tones continue throughout the evening.

How A Wine Tasting Works

Our four basic tastes, (sweet, sour, bitter, and salty) don't really tell us about the nuances of wine. It's our sense of smell that identifies most flavor characteristics. Wine is consumed through our mouth, therefore we use the term "taste." But, it is the marriage of our nose and tongue which sends a signal to the brain that says, "Oh yeah, vanilla is what I'm enjoying in this glass of Chardonnay."

Encourage guests to smell a primer ingredient, and then sniff the wine's bouquet.

They should immediately be able to detect if the ingredient's scent is present in the wine's aroma.

They may move on to another ingredient or take a sip, after which they'll read the tasting notes and discuss their findings.

Oenophiles will want to delve into the complexity of the wine's color and texture. Such discourse is educational and entertaining, but the main idea is to experience the wine through one's senses no matter how much they know about tasting, with little attention paid to its technicalities.

On with the tasting!

1.  Pour a little wine in the glass.
2.  Smell a primer ingredient for that wine.
3.  Swirl the wine in the glass.
4.  Inhale the aroma of the wine.
5.  Sip the wine.
6.  Read the tasting notes on the card and discuss.

What Conoisseurs Look For

What do wine connoisseurs look for under the cork?

An excellent wine balances the flavor of the grape with the aromatic tones of the cask, and the vintner's special crafting secrets.  Experts also have their technical checklist of tannins, acidity, weight, and so on, which they mentally compute with every sip.

Perhaps the best indication of a wine's quality is the "aftertaste" or "finish." A wine that pleasantly lingers on your palate for 20 to 30 seconds is usually considered to be outstanding. 

Put the professional standards aside for your wine tasting party.

Your guests already have the knowledge they need to figure out their likes and dislikes in a bottle of wine.

As the party host, you can help them along by "priming their palates." Tasting notes on a bottle of wine often spell out specific characteristics or ingredients that the pros have identified, such as "tones of ripe berries" or "notes of stone fruit".

By setting out bowls of these ingredients at your wine tasting party, guests can prime their senses to detect the nuances in a bottle of wine, by smelling the ingredient first, and then taking a whiff of the wine. It gives their palate a "head start" through the sense of smell, which is really how we "taste" wine.

Prepping Your Wine Tasting Party: Wine Tasting Table Set Up

As this party is all about experiencing whatever the wine's aroma offers, ask guests to bring their favorite bottle of wine. Request that they inform you of their choice ahead of time, so you can look up the wine's tasting notes, and choose the priming ingredients.

Then, proceed to set-up your beautiful wine arrangement this way:

 

• Line up the wine bottles along the back of the tasting table.
   
• Place small bowls or ramekins of the priming ingredients in front of the wine they represent. For example, a bottle of Merlot may have bowls containing chocolate and blackberries in front of it, and Chardonnay may have bowls of vanilla bean and apple as a primer.
   
• Create a note card for each bottle of wine with its tasting notes, and place the cards behind their bottles.
   
• Place red and white wine glasses on either end of the table.
   
• Place a couple of pitchers of water on the table, and a discard container. Guests can rinse their glasses with the water and then pour it into the container, or use it as a spittoon.
   
• Offer plain crackers as a palate cleanser between wines.