A recent contribution to Huffington Post:
“
When most people hear the words “wine tasting” they immediately cringe and picture a stuffy room with snooty people sniffing glasses and spewing out all kinds of ridiculous adjectives to describe the wine, but to you it just tastes like “wine.”
And that’s fine. Maybe you didn’t pick up the “fresh can of tennis balls,” “campfire,” “barnyard” or “forest floor” on that last glass of red like the guy next to you, and you feel really embarrassed because to you it tasted like Strawberry Nerds candy mixed with a Slurpee from 7-11. But I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to feel that way, and whatever you taste is just fine, provided you follow a few simple guidelines.
Wine tasting, whether you’re in a high end tasting room in Napa, a casual small winery in Oregon, or a First Growth French Chateau, has a simple set of easy to follow basic rules of etiquette, that aren’t really published, but they’re not that hard to figure out and implement the next time you visit a winery.
So let’s take a look.”