The Blending Journey ...
A 750 ml sample of each of the potential components are taken into into our laboratory tasting room ... when lined up on the bench it’s a daunting array of aromas and flavours! The winemaking team, and on occasion members of the marketing team, will then individually taste each wine and make their own notes.
Each member of the team is then welcome to put together a “trial blend” which they think is the best reflection of the particular blend under consideration. We might end up with 5 or 6 trial blends.
These trial blends are then labelled (the number is not visible) and poured into tasting glasses. We mix these up and then individually taste the wines ‘blind’, not knowing their identity.
We’ll also open a bottle/bottles of previous vintages, and compare these with our trials to ensure we are putting together a blend that truly reflects the Tahbilk style.
It’s important that we don’t discuss the wines as we taste them – we want our scores to be our own, and not influenced by comments from others in the team.
The scoring is simple – we rank the wines from 1 for our most favoured, through to our least favoured wine. Again, we’re not evaluating a personal choice but rather that which best represents the right balance of fruit, acidity, alcohol and tannins.
When everyone has tasted and scored the wines we then sum the scores for each, with the lowest total score – the wine with the most 1’s and 2’s - being the winner.
We’ll then have a group discussion as to the merits of the results, reveal the actual identity of each trial wine blend, and ensure that we’re all happy with the result.
Let’s call it a guided democracy.
