Thanks, glad you enjoyed it. When it comes to covering the bottles, that certainly has a value in assessing strictly for taste. But presentation and packaging is important too, to a degree. I suppose overall what we were trying to do was to get a feel for each individual supplier. If a company consistently used really lame packaging, I’d want to know!

I agree it would be an interesting exercise to do completely blind – there are lots of ways you could play with the format. That would make a great series of tastings in fact…

I too would suggest that if this was to be a taste test, it would have been better to rank the wines based only on the taste and do it blind. It seems odd that people would mark a wine down based on the label, whether they like it or not. I agree it matters to the “would I buy this again” rating, but your scale implied more about taste.

I personally enjoyed the Carignan and even liked the label for example.

Either way, good material for exploring where to buy wine :)

Haha it wouldn’t work with most of my mates – they only drink Stella!

I thought the Vicien was pretty good, albeit not totally typical Malbec. It did come after a Sauvignon Blanc, with might not have helped. And the label is awful! I wonder how the Stone, Vine & Sun price compares to the Naked list price and Angel price…?

One thing, I can’t believe you didn’t like the Vicien Malbec! This used to be available from Naked and was always a regular in any case I bought (along with the Hacienda Don Hernan). Maybe it was a poor vintage or maybe it just didn’t go with your food/clashed with the other wines. Anyway, isn’t that the beauty of wine … it’s a wonderfully personal thing.

All good points, and I did consider doing it in various different ways. The reason the bottles weren’t covered up is that we were judging the wine as a complete package, which includes the label. If you have an ugly or weird label staring at you while you drink, it does affect your enjoyment of the wine, so that’s why we drank the wines uncovered. If someone liked the ‘Keep Calm and Carignan’ blind, then bought a case when they got home, they might have regretted it when they opened the box! The label is an important, if secondary, part of the package I think.

As for pricing, there’s a number of ways we could have done it. The reason I opted for non blind groups was mostly because that made for the most enjoyable, fun way of tasting on the night. Again, if we were purely judging the quality of wine in each bottle, you’d be right to do the pricing totally blind, but there were other considerations too in the particular session. But all in all, a fun and revealing tasting with few real duds. But we did only taste four wines from each supplier, selected by themselves, so you’d hope not!

What I’ve found over the years is that many of us especially “non-experts”?) are unavoidably swayed in our opinion by price and label. If you know something costs £17.99, you’re looking that much harder to find interest, complexity, some reason why it has been brought to market at that price point. If you know it costs a fiver, you’re just happy if its drinkable.

Also, you raise a very valid point, that comparing old and new world wines (or styles) is always difficult in tastings of this sort. So maybe stipulating an equal mix of both would also help give a more accurate result.

Good that results were fairly even though – no complete rip offs with any of these companies, it would seem