We are going to give you a good idea that you will enjoy especially if you are a wine lover. How about doing a professional wine tasting at home?
Tasting wines as experts do can help us discover aspects and sensations that often go unnoticed. And the truth is that it is something very curious and fun that brings you even closer to this wonderful world of wine. Here we are going to propose two types of tasting, so that you can choose according to your tastes and possibilities. And we are also going to make it easy for you to download a tasting card that will be ‘your treasure map’ in this adventure, as it will guide you in a very simple way to discover all the secrets of the wine, or wines, that you have chosen.
However, if you want to have it very easy and we give you everything you need to make the tasting a success, we recommend you to choose our Blind Wine Tasting Pack, where you will find EVERYTHING you need to make this activity a success. You will learn and have a great time.
The Blind Wine Tasting Pack includes:
- 6 carefully selected wines which you will find hidden in opaque bags.
- 6 glasses.
- A professional corkscrew.
- An aroma wheel.
- A tasting guide.
- Fill-in sheets for you to write down your perceptions, and a QR code so you can download more sheets when you finish them.
- The wine tasting sheets, so that you can buy your answers with the information provided by our winemakers.
- The instructions, so that the tasting is perfect.
And absolutely all the material is reusable. So you will only need to buy new wines once you have consumed the six in this box and you can go back to tasting and tasting, while having fun and learning.
You can buy your tasting kit in our online shop and it will be delivered to your home free of shipping costs (shipments to mainland Spain and the Balearic Islands).
If you prefer to opt for the ‘artisanal’ option, read on and we’ll tell you how to do it. Here are two suggestions.
Option 1: Traditional style wine tasting. This can be done for a minimum of one person.
Option 2: Blind wine tasting, which is the one used in competitions, so that there are no conditions beyond the quality of the wine being tasted. For this option, a group of about six people is perfect, although a group of two or three people or more can also be interesting.
And what element should not be missing in any self-respecting home wine tasting? Wine, of course! Choose a wine that you are looking forward to discovering. Or you can also opt for your favourite wine if you feel like finding new nuances in it thanks to the guided tasting. In our online wine and cava shop (shipments only in Spain) you will find all the wines we make at Bodega Sierra Norte. From the influencer Pasión de Bobal to our most delicious ‘rarity’, the natural wine 1564 Natural Wine in its red or orange version (yes, yes, orange), which also has no added sulphites.
If you need any advice on how to choose from our catalogue of up to 5 Protected Designations of Origin (Utiel-Requena, Valencia, Alicante, Jumilla and Cava) and one Protected Geographical Indication (IGP Vino de la Tierra de Castilla), just let us know! You can contact us by email tienda@bodegasierranorte.com or by phone and whatsapp on 676 005 581.
Here are some suggestions ↓↓
Another great option is our ‘Mediterranean Spirit Wines’ box, where you find a premium collection with the wines: Pasión de Bobal red, Pasión de Bobal rosé, Pasión Cuvée Brut Nature, Mariluna white, Mariluna red and Equilibrio 9. And it also includes 6 wine glasses as a gift. With this pack you have everything you need for the tasting at home 😉
Shall we get down to business?
Option 1: How to do a traditional wine tasting at home?
The first thing we suggest is that you download and print the tasting sheet that you can find here.
As you will see, as well as being useful for several wines, it gives you all the information you need to follow the three phases of the tasting.
Visual phase: here we will look at its appearance (clean, bright, cloudy…) and its colour. So that nothing interferes with your perception, and especially to determine the colour, we advise you to tilt the glass a little on a white surface (tablecloth, napkin, paper…).
Smelling phase: the best advice we can give you here is to place your nose on the glass, close to the rim, and breathe in without any complexes. Don’t inhale in a restrained way, inhale deeply. And boom, the wine will start to speak to you. This part can be difficult if you don’t have a lot of aromas in your mind. It is difficult to detect the smell of a fruit or flower that you have never smelled before. But don’t worry and don’t be complex. Here is a key tip. In the olfactory phase there are two steps. First, we smell the wine in a still glass, and this will give us some information. Then we swirl the wine around the glass and smell it again. Ta-da! The wine is oxygenated and ‘opens up’ a little more, giving us new aromas that we had not detected in a still glass. This is one of the most magical steps of the tasting.
Tasting phase: come on, here comes the good stuff! Taste it, swirl it around in your mouth a little (gently, not mouthwash style) and then swallow. Here, as well as determining whether it is a fresh wine in the mouth, balanced, smooth or astringent, we also have to pay attention to the aftertaste, which is the little while that the wine remains in the mouth once we have swallowed it.
And so you have completed the tasting.
Ideally, you should be able to have the actual tasting sheet of the wine you have tasted in order to compare your perceptions with those of the winemaker who has made it. We have all the tasting notes of our wines posted in our online shop, on the page of each wine. There you can find them and even download them. As an example we leave you here the tasting sheet in english of Pasión de Bobal.
Option 2: how to do a blind tasting at home?
Don’t worry, you don’t need to go looking for a blindfold, here what we are going to cover is the wine 😉 That’s why it’s necessary that there are several people and that each one brings a wine, so nobody knows exactly what wines are on the table. The idea is to put the bottle in a bag, or cover it with silver paper… It depends on your inventiveness or what you have at home. If you think that the shape of the bottle might give clues about the wine you are tasting, designate a person to be the one to pour the wine away from prying eyes.
Each wine will be given a number and this will be the name we will put on the tasting sheet. We will be tasting in order and completing the tasting card wine by wine. If you feel like sharing your perceptions out loud, you’re sure to have a good laugh, because they are often very different.
Once you have tasted several wines, it is very enriching to go tasting one and another to compare nuances.
Finally, you will have to rate each of the wines to determine which one is the winner. And here there are many surprises, because as we defend as a winery, a high priced wine does not always have to be better than a wine of 6 € – 8 €, far from it!
We encourage you to taste a lot and try new wines. Getting out of your comfort zone is always a richness, and getting to know the world of wine in depth is always a pleasure. Enjoy!
