Don’t be afraid to Re-Visit a wine during a tasting.

I enjoy the once-a-month tastings around town because you can usually encounter something different. Yet your palate will need to be ready for such an encounter. Your palate can be a finicky thing. It can be tuned during a wine tasting, but it can also get burned out. Most tastings start with something bubbly, or something that isn’t too high in average alcohol. The two “A’s” are what can start to “burn” out, or dull your palate, Acid and Alcohol. Start with highly acidic or really boozy wine and your palate won’t get very far. So it’s a relatively accepted practice to start with a Sparkling Wine that has a 12.5-13.5 alcohol by volume content. The bubbles, which contain CO2, help with waking up the palate and the mild alcohol can be helpful in tuning it in.That’s not to say that your palate might not wake up on that first bubbly wine, or whatever the first wine is. Everything that you put in your mouth that day, prior to the tasting, can affect your palate. Did you burn your tongue on your morning coffee, or yesterday’s pizza? That’s going to affect your palate. Pollen season, getting over a cold, sinuses slightly stopped up? That is going to really affect your palate. But, all things being normal, it might take two or three wines to get your palate going, to tune it in.Any good tasting will allow you to revisit a wine at least once. It is also a good way to judge the overall quality of that particular tasting. Tasting any wine, even lower quality wines, is just like reading. And just like reading something, like a chapter for a test, you often pick up something on the second read that you may have missed on your first read. Depending on everyone’s individual palate, including the wines you have tasted up to that point, you might taste something completely different on your revisit. 98 out of 100 times the wine that you are revising will be a different temperature (almost always warmer) than your first taste. It can be amazing what you taste, or didn’t taste, on a revisit.Tonight’s Crowd Favorite was 2022 The Occasion Pinot Noir from Chile. Kind of unique, very cheap, nothing amazing, but okay. Chile is not known for its Pinot Noirs, but it was amazing how different this wine was on the revisit. All of the fellow tasters agreed, and they agreed they liked it more on the revisit. So Do Not be afraid to ask for a revisit on a wine during a tasting, you will be happy that you did.