ADVERTISING: Advertorial — GEORGE BALLING: Want to get better at wine? Taste with a group

We feel and always have that the most important thing to know about wine is what you like and what you don’t. Your own palate, after all, is the most important factor in selecting wine. Many wine consumers not only enjoy the notion of identifying wine aromatic and flavor components, but also desire to be able to express what they smell and taste. Even though most of us don’t use the flowery and at times over the top language of sommeliers, it is still nice to express your sense of what a wine, any wine, has to offer.

There is one simple way to not only grasp the best words for describing a wine, but also to identify the characteristics that lead to the words, and that is to taste with a group. Wine has its own language, and just like any new language, the way you get good at it is to be around others speaking the same language. While my French is “tres difficile,” back when Mary and I would go to France, sure enough, it would improve! Tasting and talking of wine is no different.

Granted, none of us want to get folks together every time we taste a new wine. Sometimes we just want to enjoy our glass of wine at night, just for that simple pleasure. No need to take it to a complicated point each and every time. But from time to time if we get together with friends or family, or just a loosely defined tasting group, it will help us.

Mary and I have the benefit of tasting with each other and with our distributor partners. We taste 50 to 60 wines per week, and one of the best ways to not only properly judge the potential of each wine but to prevent us from our own “wine ruts” is to hear what others have to say about it. Mary and I frequently disagree on wines. This is good since it is our job is to not only have a collection that we enjoy, but to also set aside our personal preferences so that each and every one of you has a choice of things you like.

All of us pick up different aromas and flavors in a wine. If we all liked and tasted precisely the same things, we would really only need one wine. But we don’t. Our palates are all different and for every cherry note I pick up, someone else will get plum. Add in the changes in our own palates each and every day based on our mood, what we are eating and who we are with, and sure enough you have a big range of things we all taste and smell.

This is why the simple formula of tasting with a group works. Frequently we will smell or taste something in wine that we can’t quite identify. It is literally and figuratively on the “tip of our tongue,” but then one of our tasting mates will say something along the lines of “Wow this Sancerre is really showing a grassy note right now.” It is unusual for any of us to like every new wine we taste, so if one member of our tasting group were to say something about a wine that is negative, it can also help us identify what we don’t like as well. Further you won’t just be able to identify it, but you can express why. Most wines are well-made, the winemaker may have just been aiming for something different than we like, so by saying simply that you don’t care for a flavor or aroma you can let a winemaker know that you don’t like the wine without making it personal.

When you are assembling your tasting group one of the keys is to pick folks who rarely agree with you on wine. By tasting with those that have different palate preferences you will not only broaden your palate, but because they like different flavors and aromas you will also improve your ability to identify new and more varied nuances in all wines. Once you smell and taste something one time you will start to commit those flavors and aromas to your aromatic and palate memory, and be able to recall it next time you encounter those characteristics.

Group tasting is fun and if your goal is to expand the entire experience of your wine choices, a group approach is the way to accomplish the goal.

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George Balling is co-owner with his wife, Mary Lancaster, of the dinner party, a wine and gift shop in Coeur d’Alene by Costco. The dinner party has won the award for best wine shop in North Idaho twice, including for 2018. George is also published in several other publications around the country.

After working in wineries in California and judging many wine competitions, he moved to Coeur d’Alene with Mary more than 10 years ago to open the shop. You can also follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/#!/dinnerpartyshop.