Taste burnout can be a problem. Some people fare better than others, for sure. I've done a number of tastings where I tasted close to 100 wines over about three hours ... now, that's burnout!
With our group, we developed several guidelines for good tastings. First, we shifted to a format in which the host would completely determine the tasting and normally would provide all the wine for that particular tasting. We found that this made for much tighter focus. Whenever we did something broad, we found that we didn't learn very much, but if we did something like Oregon Pinots from a particular year, then we learned a lot. We also did a fair number of verticals - one wine from one winery over a number of years. I think those are my favorites ... especially if it is a winery I like.
Typically, we would do about half a dozen wines, occasionally more, sometimes less. These are all tasted at the same time and most of us would make many passes over the group. E.g., we might start by going down the line and only evaluating color and appearance. Then we might go down the line and focus only on nose. Only on the third pass would we even taste the wines. After that, the approach was usually less linear as we would revisit the wines based on preferences. E.g., we might start out with a couple clear favorites, a clear loser and three in the middle. So, we would taste the two favorites side by side to rank those and then move to the three in the middle and try to rank those. In our tastings we would always ask people to rank them 1 to N and I would do some statistics and come out with overall winners and such. Some people were very structured in their evaluation and some just responded. of course, it gets tricky when they change after being open for a while and the rankings might change, but one has to pick some point. Some water and baguette to cleanse the palette periodically.
But, most of all, have fun! We would always follow the formal tasting with a good dinner. |
