THE VINTNERS’ TABLE

The Vintners’ Table is a blind tasting and a dinner, set in a borrowed room in early February for twelve.

Bottles are poured without their labels. Older vintages are set against younger. Scores are kept and settled over dinner. The Court has been wrong before.

The Form

A label is information that arrives before the wine does, and once it has arrived the wine cannot be tasted honestly. Everyone knows this. Almost nobody acts on it.

The remedy is old and simple. Cover the bottle, pour it, and ask the table what it thinks before anyone knows what they are drinking.

What follows is usually humbling. Expensive bottles are placed below cheap ones. Vintages people hold strong opinions about turn out to be indistinguishable from vintages they do not. Somebody at the table gets it right, and it is generally the person who said least beforehand.

This is the Court’s own argument made into an evening. What a thing costs and what a thing is worth are separate questions, and the second is only answerable with the label off.

The Evening

Twelve at one table. Guests arrive at seven.

The bottles are decanted and numbered before anyone sits down. Nobody in the room knows the order, the Court included.

The flights are poured against each other rather than in isolation: an older vintage beside a younger one from the same ground, or two houses from the same year. Comparison is what makes tasting possible. A wine on its own is only a wine.

Cards are kept and scores written down. They are collected before the labels are shown, which is the only way scoring means anything.

Dinner is served while the results are read out, and the argument continues through it.

What Is Asked

The code is stated in the invitation.

The Court sits at eight whether or not everyone is there.

Telephones stay in pockets. A photographer is present for part of the evening, and what is worth keeping is sent afterward.

Nobody is expected to know anything. The point of tasting blind is that expertise is a disadvantage as often as an advantage, and a member who has never scored a wine in his life has as good a chance at the table as anyone.

Nobody is pitched at the table.

The Places

Twelve. Members are written to in January.

The sum is stated in the invitation and covers the whole of the evening, including what is poured, which in some years is the larger part of it.