LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Take a glass of red wine, a glass of white, give five university students 15 minutes to blind-taste them, discuss them and draw conclusions, then present in great detail the wines, for a jury that includes the World’s Best Sommelier 2013, Paolo Basso. This is what we saw Saturday night 22 March at the finals of the Millésime Wine Tasting Contest in Lausanne.
I was one of 150-plus people at a gala dinner at the EHL (Ecole Hotelière de Lausanne) who watched the finals, won – to my great delight – by my accidental tablemates, the Oxford University Blind Tasting Society. The group was very much international, with a PhD student from Bahrain who explained his work to us as mainly to do with lasers, a graduate student from Singapore who is tracking how gold was mined in the ancient world, two students from Vancouver working on Masters degrees in English and IT, and an undergraduate who is studying Moroccan urban settlements.
They lived up to the society’s impressive-sounding name by putting in a stellar performance Saturday, all the more impressive for me when I learned that two of them have only been doing blind tasting since September 2013, and that the society is anything but snobbish or filled with wine pros. Hats off to their trainer!
The team of five tasters won the top award, followed by the Copenhagen Business School and host team EHL. The winners probably didn’t hear it, since they were on stage while each team leader presented their results, but the wine professionals around me were whistling under their breath and saying wow. Frankly, I doubt few of us could have done as well. Paolo Basso congratulated the winning team on making very few errors and judging the wines well.
Members of the society meet weekly to do blind tastings and learn about wines. Annual membership is £20 and each tasting session is generally £5, impressive given the quality of some of the wines they taste, which include older vintages.
Here’s how the society describes its work:
“Blind tasting is a splendid skill to acquire and it will greatly help complement the two most important joys of life – eating and drinking. It is also a great dinner party trick to impress both hosts and guests. Use your time at the University well – no Oxford experience is complete until you have done some serious wine drinking!”
Leave a Reply