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Blind Wine Tasting
Tasting wines blind is instructional for wine certification students, but it can also be a fun activity for groups of wine lovers or just plain wine drinkers. I participate in a couple of blind tasting groups which are now proceeding virtually due to our stay at home mandates from the novel coronavirus. We’ve been forced to change up our routines since we can no longer all taste the same wine.

Disclosure: I received the 4 half-bottle blind tasting set from Lifetime Vintage as a sample. No other compensation was involved. The opinions I express here are my own.

Blind tasting is simultaneously scary and fun!

Lifetime Vintage Supplies the Wines
Lifetime Vintage is the brainchild of some Stanford Business School wine lovers, friends, professors, and entrepreneurs. They offer several products/services. Their “blind tasting” product is curated half-bottle sets of wines, wrapped for blind tastings. They have a wide variety of sets available and can ship to almost all 50 states (US liquor laws are set individually by states. thanks prohibition….).

The idea is this: You gather your group of friends, wine students, family members, etc.. You contact Lifetime Vintage and order the same set of wines for each physical location of your group. Wines are delivered already packaged for blind tasting and are numbered. Then, you go online with your group for a fun session.  Do your family Zoom sessions need something new and different to do? This could be it!

We went global in our tasting session. Amber Lebeau (shown) organized the event and participated virtually from Paris!

Blind Tasting for Wine Geeks
Wine students can be pretty choosy when it comes to blind wines for tasting, although a bottle of Barefoot may intentionally be thrown in the mix from time to time! Our sample session was organized by Amber Lebeau and attended by several bloggers in the US as well as Dylan Robbins, the CEO of Lifetime Vintage. You might have guessed Dylan is a serious wine geek! Amber lives in Paris, and Lifetime Vintage can’t deliver there yet, so she participated virtually and we all chatted about each wine before making our guess. Amber had the double challenge of not having tasted the wines!

Contrary to popular belief, blind tasting is not about guessing the exact wine from the entire universe of wines. Wines are limited to good examples of important wines from around the world.  Dylan told us they have a team of wine professionals curating the sets and that we could count on the wines being appropriate, and they were. How did I do? Wine 1 – way off! total miss, humbling. Wine 2 – pretty close, right grape and right state. Wine 3 – good, right grape and right region. Wine 4, nailed it!

I get a little nervous seeing them wrapped up!

1-Gruner Veltliner 2-Chardonnay 3-Pinot Noir 4-Nebbiolo

Blind Tasting Purely for Fun
Lifetime Vintage has assembled a wide variety of sets for serious students and also for people who just want to have some fun. They can also assemble custom sets as they are constantly looking to increase their offering.  Interested in doing a new world – old world comparison?  All Cabernet Sauvignon? They’ll be there to help. In the purely recreational scenario, a group may enjoy finding something new compared to a favorite. When they’re blind, you might be surprised which one you like best!

These are all classic wines, classic region. We could expect to encounter these in a certification exam situation.

How much does it cost?
The cost for a standard 4 bottle blind tasting set is $95. As each is a half-bottle, you’ll get 2 full glasses or 4 tasting portions from each one. If you have multiple people at your physical location, you can split the cost.  The wines are not bargain basement wines, I searched online and found the bottles totaled about $75, but they came from a variety of sellers scattered around the states. If you are coordinating a family or friends group, you’ll have an extremely difficult time getting the same set of wines to all participants on your own. Lifetime Vintage has it figured out! You can jump to their website at this link.

If you’re a hotshot taster and you see this today, you can enter their competition, scheduled for June 6!

Finally, you might enjoy seeing what my fellow bloggers thought of the experience, you can find them here:

• Amber Lebeau – Spitbucket – Instagram – Twitter
• Noelle Harmon – Outwines – Instagram – Twitter
• Lauren Walsh – The Swirling Dervish – Instagram – Twitter
• Kendeigh Worden – The Grape Grind – Instagram
• Jeff Burrows – Food Wine Click! (here!) – Instagram – Twitter