Seeing a wine’s label or its price or region or critical score before tasting the wine pollutes the fresh green breast of the tasting experience and makes a slave driver out of Expectation. Foreknowledge, all too often, results in a judgment about quality and worth without even a moment being devoted to actually letting it fill your nose and roll around your mouth.
Nothing in wine is objective. As the quintessential sensory and sensuous object, wine has as many different faces and levels of quality as there are people perceiving it. How do you convey the true orangeness of the setting sun to the sightless one? Or accurately transmute to another the memories associated with the delicacies of childhood? In order to experience something as fully and objectively as possible - wine, in this case - one has to remove as many mediating barriers as possible. That is why tasting a wine without knowing what it allows you to experience it in as true a way as there is.
We cannot help but to revel in the re-imagination and the rediscovery of these wines
“Blind tasting” is not just a parlor game, one that much of the content on wine programs is built around. It is also the method the Steven Kent Winery production team uses to arrive at all of its blends. Each vintage we are attempting to find as perfect a representation of a particular wine as we can, one that not only expresses the innate quality of the blend but one that also hews as closely as possible to the picture we have in our minds of its apotheosis. We are working toward a specific goal, to be sure, when we start the blending process, but - as wine lovers - we cannot help but to revel in the re-imagination and the rediscovery of these wines each time we sup from them.
Our process starts out by looking at our wines widely. We harvest Cabernet Sauvignon from as many as six different vineyards each season. Within these sites there are often multiple blocks of Cab with different clonal origins. Each block (there are now eight different clones of Cabernet at Ghielmetti Vineyard, for instance) is harvested and vinified and barreled down separately. Each of these “lots” becomes a potential contributor to Lineage or The Premier Cabernet. We will make a composite sample of the lot by grabbing the same amount from each barrel and putting it into a marked bottle. Some years there may be as many as a dozen separate lots that go through this preliminary “macro” evaluation.
Each lot is tasted without knowing from which block it comes, evaluated by the team for potential quality and kept for further “micro” tasting or declassified into a different wine program. Once the lots are separated, those that are deemed of great-enough quality to be included in our finest wines, are tasted barrel sample by barrel sample - randomly organized into blind flights of eight - and haggled over until we arrive at the combination that fulfills our commercial and esthetic needs. Each vintage of Lineage takes months to put together - chosen from 75-100 barrels - and we strive to make sure the finest example, out of as many as 80 different blends, is the one that is finally represented in the bottle. Tasting the samples blind is the only way for us to reach a conclusion that celebrates the synergistic magic of the process while helping to ensure the potential greatness of our flagship wine.
Too often we make an assumption about the quality of the vineyard blocks based upon their past performance and impute to that “reputation” a quality level that is not
No perfect world is this. The vagaries of each season conspire to create new lands; to actually see them you must go in blind.
actually exhibited in the wine. All of us are prone to this bias; it is really the same mechanism that helped our species survive - the bite that didn’t kill you is the one you continue to take. If Vineyard Y made great wine last year, it is reasonable to assume it will do so again. No perfect world is this. The vagaries of each season conspire to create new lands; to actually see them you must go in blind.
We have made enough vintages of Lineage to understand that the painstaking process we follow is the right way to get to our goal. The vineyards that have not historically performed to a requisite level of quality do so on a regular basis. Those that thrive, consistently thrive. We only get one chance a year to make great wine, to make vinous history, and we continue to find that the less knowing there is the more the discovery resonates.
I truly do learn more from blind tastings.