Editorial: Why I suck at the wine options game

The South African Wine Tasting Championships, founded in 2013, is an annual competition that seeks to reward those tasters best able to identify variety, producer and vintage of a wine tasted blind. This year, participants can acquire kits of 10 tubes of wine – one kit, one entry – entries set to close on 12 August (find out more here). Top performers not only get bragging rights but are also in contention to be selected for Team South Africa to participate in the World Blind Wine Tasting Championship, taking place in Bordeaux on 12 October.

The South African Wine Tasting Championships is basically a version of wine options, a guessing game, generally credited to the late Australian wine champion Len Evans, which encourages participants to focus on the characteristics of a wine served blind, label out of sight.

The question master starts off by asking very general questions such as “Is this a Northern or Southern Hemisphere wine?”, gradually getting more precise. Those giving the wrong answer are eliminated from the game; those giving the right answer continue, until the producer, grape variety and year have been correctly deduced or until there is no one left in the game.

Options is great fun, and I’ll never decline to participate, but I’m not very good at it and I’m not ashamed to admit it. That’s because I believe wine tasting for tasting for variety and origin and tasting for aesthetic quality involve different focuses and criteria.

At stake when it comes to options are the issues of typicity and authenticity. You’re required to have a broad knowledge of grape variety and blends, and then examine how well the wine in front of you adheres to an archetype. This is premised on the notion that the wine’s geographic origin, including influences of climate, soil, and traditional winemaking practices, impart unique attributes of aroma and flavour. The way to become good at options is to have undertaken a lot of comparative analysis – which involves assessing the widest possible array of wines with a view to understanding and appreciating the nuances and distinctions between them. To differentiate confidently and consistently between Médoc and Stellenbosch, for instance, therefore depends on a lot of investment, in terms of either time, money, or both.

Tasting for aesthetic quality, in contrast, is fundamentally about pleasure, which is to say how enjoyable and pleasing the wine is to the taster. It starts with sensory evaluation, which is the overall experience that the wine provides, including aroma, taste, texture, and finish. Balance, of course, is key, this being probably more about intuition than anything that can be learnt, a sense of how well a wine’s components (acidity, tannin, alcohol, sugar) interact. Qualitative assessments can never be fixed and definitive because they are always circumstance-based and involve non-empirical judgement calls.  

I admire those who can focus on wine’s identifiable physical characteristics as well as regional markers that they have absorbed over time with the ability to then determine it’s relative typicity and authenticity, but this makes wine rather too technical for me.

Tasting for distinctive traits may well get you to the wine’s identity but tasting for aesthetic quality is premised on finding the joy in wine. Both approaches can overlap, as a wine’s aesthetic qualities are often influenced by its variety and origin, but the primary focus and methods of evaluation differ. Wine appreciation is neither wholly objective nor subjective, but I tend to want it to be at least fun and at most moving so rather more subjective than not.