If you’ve followed my blog before, you know I love blind tastings, so much that every October Mr. Lush and I taste everything we can “blind”. (for those of you who are nor familiar with the term, tasting wine “blind” means you have to guess what’s in the glass-usually the varietal, although experts can guess even more!) We accomplish this at home by switching off who pours the bottle; last night I selected a bottle, poured Mr. Lush a glass, and he correctly guessed it was a Chardonnay from California.
By no stretch are we experts-we both get more wrong than we do right, and we don’t try to guess the vintage or even specific AVA (although occasionally we might…but usually fail!). Naturally if its from our own collection we do better, because we can narrow it down. But we spend all year drinking and learning about wine, so it’s a good time to really focus in and apply what we’ve learned. Sometimes we throw each other easy ones, sometimes we mix it up and throw each other a curve ball, but we have fun with it.
I initially called this experience the Blind Ambition Tour (yes, that
is a Madonna reference) but this year I’m going to tweet about my experiences with the hashtag #blindtober. My twitter name is stlwinelush and so I invite you to join me this October – taste wine blind and tweet about your experiences. Going to someone's house? Have them pour you a glass before showing you what it was. Head into a bar and tell the bartender to pick something out for you. Or, for even more of a challenge, head into a bar like Flemings, where they have 100 wines by the glass and ask them to make you a flight-so you’ll have 3 wines to guess. If you fail epically, don’t fret-we’re there with you. Get out of your comfort zone and give it a shot.
I’ll keep an eye out for the #blindtober tweet, cheers!
