Let’s Get Vertical

Recently, Grape Envy Guy and I gathered some friends together to take part in a blind vertical tasting.  He and I have done vertical tastings before, but none of our friends had.  It was, however, the first time Grape Envy and I had ever done a blind tasting, so we thought it would be fun all around.

We recently shared our experiences with a vertical tasting we did at Autumn Hill Vineyards with you.  Our first experience with this actually came from Horton Vineyards a few years ago when we lucked into a day when they were offering a vertical tasting of their port.  That experience convinced me that I did like port, if it was the right one.  It also showed me the value of this type of tasting experience.  While prior to this I had intellectually understood that wine was an agricultural product that would differ year to year based on temperature, rainfall, and handling while it aged, I had never internalized it.  By tasting a number of different ports and talking with the staff about how the years differed in terms of weather, wine blend, and aging choices made by the winemaker, I internalized this idea.  This means I’m now a sucker for a vertical tasting.

These are often offered as part of very expensive events (e.g., the Gray Ghost Vineyards vertical cabernet sauvignion tasting), but some wineries do make them more readily available from time to time, so I recommend getting on their email lists so you’re aware of these events rather than having to stumble onto them.  They are also not that hard to do yourself with the help of a small wine collection and/or a helpful wine shop staff member.  If you want to do it yourself, all you need are three or more wines form the same vineyard from different years, some friends, a corkscrew, and some wine glasses.  if you want, you can add the element of uncertainty by blinding the bottle with the help of some brown paper bags, tape, and a marker to label the bags with letters or numbers.

So, what did we taste, and why did we decide on a blind vertical tasting?  We decided to taste the three editions of the Bacchanalia from Old House Vineyards, a perennial favorite around our house.  The 3rd edition was released about a month ago, and we still had a few bottles of the previous edition in our wine racks.  We also found one bottle left from the first edition of this wine.  Since it’s chambourcin based, it’s not a wine that would necessary age well, so we thought it was time to drink it, and this would be a fun way to check out the changes in this blend and find out a bit more about we liked about wine in the meantime.  We decided to blind the tasting so we wouldn’t be influenced by knowledge about the edition of the wine since both Grape Envy Guy and I had strong inclinations about which edition we’d each pick as a favorite.

So, what did we like?  The good news for everyone out there is that the current edition of the Bacchanalia, the only one still available for sale, was the clear winner of the evening.  People described it as smokey, bright, and having some plum notes.  The previous edition has less smoke and more fruit.  The first edition was the fruitiest by far with the least of the smokey notes.  It had a nose that was somewhat reminiscent of a Bordeaux, and it had a longer finish.  So, why are there such differences?  Well growing season definitely matters, but a lot of these differences are likely due to the blend of grapes used to make these wines.  For example, the first edition of the Bacchanalia included merlot, a grape no longer grown at Old House Vineyards.  This likely accounts for nose that was somewhat Bordeaux-like, at least in comparison to the other wines in the lineup.

We hope to do more of these types of blind tastings in the future.  As we start to build up a library with some wines we plan to age, we may be able to do more vertical tastings of local wines.  We may also do some horizontal tastings (same wine varietal from the same year but from different wineries).  We try to buy nearly all of our wine locally (but that’s another post – what can I say, I’m an Alton Brown/Good Eats fan), but you could also work with the staff at a wine shop to bring in bottles from the same vineyard in different years to host your own vertical tasting of wines from a different wine region in the US or abroad.  It’s fun, informative, and a good excuse to have a party.

The Let’s Get Vertical by Swirl, Sip, Snark, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.