Wine Tasting Party

A wine tasting party is a fun and affordable to taste multiple wines with a group of friends.

First get together a few different bottles of wine, but with each bottle in a brown paper bag so you don't know what it is. You and your guests taste each wine in turn to see how much you can determine about the flavours, the type of grapes used, the way it was made, even perhaps the region and year.

At the end, you can compare notes and see which was the most popular wine. The idea is to improve your knowledge and also get to taste a range of wines and decide which one(s) you like best so you can go out and buy more of them!

Why not include a cleanskins.com Shiraz in the tasting with 5 other shiraz of $20 - $30 a bottle and see how well it compares with wines of twice or three times the price?

We've put together the following tips to help make your wine tasting party a successful one:

• when planning which group of wines to compare, there are two common approaches: the vertical tasting, where you try wines of a different year from the same wine maker, or the horizontal tasting, where you try wines of the same type and year from different winemakers, perhaps all from the same region.
• when inviting your guests, ask them to avoid wearing perfume or aftershave, since smell is an important part of tasting wines. Smoking is a no-no for the same reason.
• have good lighting and an area of white tablecloth available to use as a backdrop when checking out the colour of the wines
• provide unsalted crackers and mild cheese and room temperature drinking water handy to cleanse the palate in between tasting each wine. Avoid chilled or iced water as this can numb the taste buds.
• provide your guests with a sheet of paper for taking notes that lists each wine as a number, and number the brown bags to match.
• provide a copy of our Wine Tasting Guidelines to get some tips on tasting.
• at the end of the tasting, bring out any tasting notes you have for each wine, remove the bags, and argue about which was the best.

Be prepared to place orders for more cleanskins.com wine at the end of the party!