Can He GUESS THE WINE? Tough Blind Tasting CHALLENGE w/TV Host and Sommelier!

Hey, I'm Vince, host of V is for Vino, and welcome to Vino Blind. So these are sessions where I decided I needed to get better at blind tasting because I hadn't done it in quite some time and I figured you might as well do it along with me. So if you've seen any of the other videos, what I did is I had my crew out and pick a bunch of wines from the Court of Masters advanced level wine options. So if you wanna play at home, those are the wines we're working with. I'm gonna go through the sight, nose, and palate, and I just don't wanna skip anything because you're watching at home, so I want you to be able to guess along with me. So I'm gonna kind of use these notes. Obviously, it's a white wine. I know nothing else. So before we smell, look at the color. This is kind of like a straw color. This is a little darker than like a super light, super youthful wine, but it's not super dark either. It's a little yellow in there. You always wanna look at it kind of against a white background. Yeah, I'm not getting a ton on the sight other than that. There's no like rim variation or color that would tell me age. That being said, let's get in the smell. As you know, the smell is my favorite part, especially the first smell. Your first impressions on a wine, your kind of gut are pretty important. So let's do it. Okay. I got the gut call. I always have the call that I think it is right away, and then from there, we will confirm or deny it with our data, but I've got my gut call. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna go with my gut this time. Because every time I don't, it seems to be wrong. But here's what I got. I got like a rubber lanolin thing going on right away. Waxy rubber lanolin. There is one grape to me that does that, period. There's one grape to me that does that. Now, I don't wanna reveal it so you can guess at home, but that's a pretty big tell. The intensity is pretty high. I'd say medium plus. Young or old? The color leads me to believe that it might be a younger wine, but the palate will kind of confirm if that's true or not. But I'm gonna guess it's kind of a younger wine. Where's our fruit character? It's in peaches and stone fruit and apples, yellow apples. It's a yellow land. Not a ton of citrus going on. Not really tropical either. Stone fruit, apples, pears. What is our fruit character? When we talk about fruit character, what we're looking for is, you know, is it fresh? Is it ripe? Is it bruised? Little bruised. Ripe, maybe overripe. I might just be talking myself into a self-fulfilling prophecy, but based on what my conclusion is, that all makes sense to me based on what I think it is. Smoke, so non-fruit. Smoke, told you that kind of rubber. A little bit of wax, a little bit of beeswax honey. It's a savory wine. Minerality, yes, but all those savory components, more than fruits, so remember that. That's kind of important. Like, the first thing I got right away was not fruit. Now, that usually tells me it's an old world wine. Let's get into the palate. Oh, this might change what it is. No! This might change my guess, so here's why. There's some residual sugar, some serious residual sugar. It's tricky. Yeah, there's sugar. I would say, like, not sweet, but off-drive. It still could be the wine I said it is, but man, that's a lot of sugar for that. All right, so you know that. Acid levels. Crunchy, high acidity. Medium plus. And that's with the sugar. It still has that acid with the sugar. Imagine without the sugar how much acid it would have, because sugar and acid do this balancing act thing, right? So, without the sugar, you would taste that acid even more. So, the fact that I'm getting medium plus acid with a lot of sugar tells me that's a pretty cool kind of wine. Body. It's medium because of the sugar. It would be medium minus without it, but this is a medium wine because that sugar gives it a viscosity, right? Think about, like, you have, like, anything sweet, anything with syrup in it. It's why Coca-Cola has bubbles in it, right? Because if you drank Coca-Cola on its own flat, it's disgusting, it's syrupy. But you had those bubbles, you had that acid, all of a sudden it's bright, and that's this thing, right? Alcohol. Light, light alcohol. Finish in complexity. Finish medium plus. The sugar also adds to that. I'm tasting all that, you know, kind of sweet lingering effect as I go down. I'm saying the word sweet, by the way, but don't get confused. It's not a sweet dessert wine. This is still a table wine. This isn't a dessert wine. But long finish. Still tasting in my mouth, 30 seconds after I took the last sip. Complexity. Medium. Not a ton going on. You know, it's a nice wine. I talked about fruit. I talked about some fun, you know, not fruit character. My initial conclusion was Old World, and I'm sticking with that because the acidity's high. I talked a lot about the non-fruit character. The Old World, New World's the toughest call for me personally. I have trouble picking that. It is gonna be cool climate. Now what we do for our possible grapes is we go down the list and say, okay, here are the grapes it could be based on our advanced Court of Masters. And then we say, we deduce. This is deductive tasting. So what is it not? It's not most of these grapes because there's only two grapes on this entire list that can have sugar like this. And it's either Riesling or it's Chenin Blanc. That's it. It can't be anything else. So I'm happy to know that I'm gonna get it in my 50-50. I mean, if it's anything other than that, it would be very uncharacteristic. I initially thought it was Chenin Blanc. Off the nose, I was like, it's got that rubber wax thing going on that I associate with Chenin Blanc. And Chenin Blanc can have some residual sugar, but not like this. Usually. There are sweet Chenin Blancs, but this is a lot of sugar. So the only thing that would determine now is it Chenin or is it Riesling? Elyse is laughing. I'm sure it's because I've said one of the right answers and she's like, wants me to go towards the lot. The stone fruit character tracks with Riesling. The honey character tracks with Riesling. If I'm like, I'm saying waxy, but like waxy would also be honey. That rubber I'm saying could technically be petrol, right? That could be like that petrol character, which is Riesling. So I could talk myself into either one for sure. But just based off the amount of residual sugar, I have to go Riesling. There's too much sugar for Chenin. Even the dry ones that they put a little sugar in has like a little bit of sugar, but not this much. The only other thing it could be is instead of being a German Riesling, it could be an Australian Riesling. Maybe that's why I'm getting a bigger body. I talked a lot about the non-fruit, but was the non-fruit mineral or is the non-fruit Riesling character? So the honey, that's not a mineral character, right? The petrol is a grape character. Past that, I'm not really talking a ton about minerality and the weight is pretty high and the sugar's heavy handed. German Rieslings tend to be a little more sparing with their sugar content. This could be Australian Riesling. I don't think it's Alsatian Riesling because that would be dry and it would be higher in alcohol. So my gut would have put it at Germany. I'm gonna go Germany. I won't be surprised if it's Australian. So here's my guess. Final conclusion. I think the grape is Riesling. I think it's from Germany. Say Mosel. I think it's quality level slash sweetness level. And I think it's a 2019. I think the price level is $22. And we'll see where it goes. Yay, I did. Oh, this is great stuff. This is a great producer. I was only one year off, 2020. It's Cabernet, wow. So that I was off on, the quality level. So this is the lowest of the sugar levels, usually. But they can be sweet. Germany's weird. The levels often correlate to sweetness, but they don't always, as is evidenced here. Sometimes the Cabernets can be really, really sweet. This is really low in alcohol, as I said, 8.5%. You know, that explains all the residual sugar. That explains that richer, fuller body. The Cabernets are usually kind of the less ripe grapes. So that's a little strange, but I'm really happy. I was one year off. I got the place, you know, Mosel, Germany. I'm really happy with this. It feels good to get a W in the column. Did you guys get it right? I probably threw you off by talking, you know, not enough about the mineral component, because I didn't get it. The sugar covered it up to me, but overall happy. This was fun. Let's keep it rolling. I'm ready to do some more. Bring them on, bring them on. All right, cheers guys. We'll see you next time on Vino Blind.