Wine Tasting Plans

RadCru, a one-sale-at-a-time site that specializes in distinct/uncommon wines, is selling a 1998 sparkling wine from Carneros, California, with free shipping if you order three or more bottles. (Shipping for wine is expensive; free shipping is usually worth $20+.) This wine has some good reviews on CellarTracker, and I'm interested in one or two for myself (and probably my parents), but three is a bit much. Is anybody who's local to Clemson or Greenville interested in going in for a bottle of this?

The main thing for today: I'm organizing another wine tasting in Clemson. It looks like we'll have 8 people, although there hasn't been a final decision about whether this will be a genuine "wine tasting" (sampling, comparing, and discussing the wines) or just a casual get-together with wine present (in the background of games or general conversation).

I sent out an emailing asking for preferences/opinions on the general style of the tasting, but haven't heard back from everyone yet. As of right now it's looking like a fairly standard tasting: casual with one or two fun, easy-drinking wines and two or one serious, conversation-sparking wines. I'm looking forward to it—I really enjoy planning these. It can get a bit pricey, but it's well worth it in my opinion.

Organizing a wine tasting has a lot in common with user experience design: there's a mix of science and art (rules about what to serve first/last/etc, guidelines about which foods/cheeses to pair with each wine, best practices for which bottles/styles/regions/grapes to serve, and the mushy gut feelings that re-examine all of that and actually get the job done), and although a tremendous amount of thought and planning can go into it, the actual reality of everybody else's experience trumps everything I say, expect, or decide.

Also in parallel to UX, I've been refining my approach to 'designing' the wine tasting based on past experiences—with the confound that those experiences are largely determined by the wine itself and different individual preferences. The infrequency of our tastings makes it a slow process, but I think things have improved over time.

In the beginning I tried a plain vanilla voting system: I emailed out a list of possible themes for the tasting (stuff like "South American wines" and "Syrah/Shiraz from around the world"), and asked people to vote. Although a few people were diligent about replying, most were very busy and/or were open to anything. Also, we quickly learned that deciding a theme didn't amount to planning the tasting—several guests were happy to donate cheese, snacks, and anything else that might apply to the tasting, but simply listing a wine style didn't help there.

I gradually moved to a more conversational format: give general descriptions for a short list of possible categories, then follow up with an email listing the specific wines we planned to have, with descriptions about what to expect and what cheese/snacks might pair with it. I was a bit worried that nobody would read the longer emails, but several people commented that they always did. This approach seemed to work out rather well, but the larger time investment made it difficult for me to handle everything regularly and consistently (and also resulted in a whole lot of emails for everyone).

From there I tried several short-lived revisions (like listing a whole bunch of individual wines with descriptions and asking people to vote or veto, or taking a more top-down "here's what we're going to have" approach), but in general things were "good enough" and the tastings worked out well.

Since I left Clemson, all planning has been done via email and all wine tastings have been at a friend's apartment rather than my own. These changes have made it particularly difficult to plan or predict the 'feel' of the tasting—the general atmosphere and vibe—which led to some awkwardness. E.g., a few average-quality bottles were opened for a serious tasting which I thought was going to be a casual game night, and a very nice bottle was opened for a loud, rowdy party where almost everybody else (mostly young people I didn't know) was drinking cheap beer. :-/ The resultant user experiences weren't bad, but there was certainly room for improvement. Previously, the overall atmosphere/feel would be known well ahead of time (from discussing the tasting face-to-face), but that doesn't work anymore.

So, in planning this weekend's tasting I decided to try something different: I'm trying to determine the feel/atmosphere first, then base the wines off of that—it should be similar to the same "squishy gut feeling"-heavy stuff that worked so well in the past. So far it's shaping up to be similar to our last tasting, which went very well, but I want to hear back from a few more people before any significant decisions/declarations are made....

Wow, this entry got longer than I expected. As I said, I really enjoy planning these. =)

Do you have any thoughts on planning or attending wine tastings?