The Wine Knows

For any wine that is reviewed in Wine Press Northwest (including our Wine of the Week selections), we taste blind. What does this mean?

If we taste single-blind, it means we know what kind of wine we're tasting (such as Syrah) but not the producer. If we taste double-blind, we know neither the producer nor the variety or style.

We could take it to one more level. We could use black glasses so we would not know if a wine is red or white.

Riedel, the global leader in fine wine stemware, has had a line of beautiful black glasses for a few years, and now it has created them for its hip "O" line. I received one of these from my wife's aunt for Christmas, which will proudly stand alongside the black stems I purchased a few years back.

You might think it would be simple to figure out if a wine were white or red, but you would be surprised. Calvin Trillin wrote a delicious article about this a few years ago in the New Yorker.

After reading this, I purchased my first black glasses because I wanted to put them - and myself - to the test. I gathered some friends for the experiment, and we poured various wines. I purposefully chose reds with little tannin and whites with fewer aromatics.

For the first person, I chose a Cabernet Franc for one glass and a Viognier for another. Our friend and neighbor Kenton was entirely confused at first after smelling and tasting one of the wines. He decided the second one was a red, so he guessed the first one was a white - and he got them both right. Next was Vanessa, who now is a member of our tasting panel. She had little trouble figuring out which was which. My wife, Melissa, was next. She got one right and one wrong (by this point, we were putting two different whites in the glasses). Vanessa's mother, a fabulous cook, easily picked out which was which.

Then came Vanessa's father, a soil scientist of great renown in Canada. He is, shall we say, self-assured. So I took a DeLille Cellars white Meritage and put it in both glasses. After a fair bit of swirling, sniffing and sipping, he confidently pronounced that one was red, the other was white - and one was decidedly superior.

My turn came last, and Melissa and Vanessa were scheming against me. They handed me a glass, and I took my time evaluating. I did not feel any pressure because if I got it wrong, it proved the point of the experiment. If I got it right? Well, I am a professional.

I was entirely confused by the wine. It had beautiful aromas of oranges and vanilla, which led me to think it was a Viognier. But when I tasted it, I could swear its berries, black currants and smooth tannins were Cabernet Franc. I said as much and gave up.

Melissa's and Vanessa's faces fell: It turns out they had blended the Viognier and Cab Franc in the same glass just to screw with me. Let's just say they don't try that anymore.

I'd rather be lucky than good.