With the release of our 2025 Wine Champions winners, it feels timely to talk about blind tasting, what it is, why it’s done and, so you can impress with your own palate prowess, how to do it yourself.
In a nutshell, tasting wine blind is the process of sampling wines without any knowledge of its provenance, producer or price. Most often, for practicality, it is done by wrapping the bottle in a ‘blind bag’ to keep hidden anything that could be gleaned from the bottle to tell the taster what it is. If you’ve been to our in-person wine tastings you will likely have seen this set up as we often like to include a little blind-tasting challenge and members love to try their skills!
Have you ever tried a wine without knowing what it is? Congratulations, you’ve just done a blind tasting!
Within the wine industry blind tasting is generally done to evaluate quality without bias, which is what our buyers were doing by tasting over 900 wines from our range in early spring to determine this year’s Wine Champion winners.
Wine Champions 2025
Shop 2025 Champions
Morgon Les Charmes, Dominique Piron 2023
The Society's Exhibition English Sparkling Wine NV
The Society's Exhibition Alsace Gewurztraminer 2021
Wente Vineyards Beyer Ranch Zinfandel 2022
The Society's Exhibition White Rioja Reserva 2018
Our Fathers ‘There is a Light’ McLaren Vale Shiraz-Grenache 2023
A de Château d'Arche, Bordeaux Blanc 2022
Champagne Albert Lebrun Premier Cru Brut NV
Château Cissac, Haut-Médoc 2018
A. A. Badenhorst Curator White, Coastal Region 2024
It’s also an exam component to achieve qualifications from Wine and Spirt Education Trust (WSET), The Institute of Masters of Wine (MW) and Court of Master Sommeliers (MS), where the focus is on being able to identify what’s in the glass as well as making a (correct if you want to pass!) assessment of quality.
For wine fans outside of the industry, it’s still a valuable practice in honing what you like and potentially finding something new that you may not have thought to try before. And to take it to the complete opposite of academic, it can be a fun party trick to impress your friends with!
And onto how. Successful blind tasting starts simply with lots and lots of tasting practice. Being able to build up an internal knowledge bank of what individual grapes smell and taste like, how winemaking practices present themselves in the glass and any key signifiers of specific regions, is perhaps the most useful place to start. When you’re then presented with a blind tasting, my top tips would be to take your time, trust what you can smell and taste, and try not to jump to conclusions – one whiff of cherries does not automatically a nebbiolo make!
So why not start (or continue) your blind-tasting journey by joining us at a Wine Society tasting, we’d love to see you there!
