It’s a bit like one of those bad dreams. There you are, with a line-up of glasses half full of red wine laid out in front of you. You know that you are going to be asked to identify the origins of those wines. No one will give you the slightest clue. And you’ve only got a few minutes per wine to do the job.
Nightmarish as this sounds, the scenario will be familiar to anyone who’s ever sat a blind-tasting wine exam. But let’s make the task a little bit easier, shall we? Let’s assume that you’re told that the wines all come from within the Bordeaux region. Even then, trying to pin down the source of each of them is no easy task. Nevertheless, every glass of wine contains clues – the question is, what’s the best way of making these clues add up to a strong conclusion?
‘My approach is to think about typicity,’ explains Jeremy Cukierman MW, author and former director of France’s Kedge Wine School. Cukierman won the Madame Bollinger Award for excellence in tasting the year that he graduated (2017), and has clearly spent time honing not only his tasting skills, but also the theoretical framework within which he embeds the evidence he gathers from the glass. ‘I worked hard on identifying benchmark
