Have you ever wondered how a particularly sunny summer might be reflected in the taste of a wine? A cool spring, an early harvest? What about the way those flavors might change and develop, year over year, as the wine slowly matures in the bottle?

The first few sips of a newly discovered wine always bring with them a burst of sensory experience. Different flavors, textures, and aromas compete for your attention, and it can be remarkably difficult to isolate which of those stem from the grape variety, which from the conditions of the vintage, and which from the age of the wine in the bottle.

The answer, you’ll be happy to hear, is generally to drink more wine. After tasting a few dozen Pinot Noirs, you start to get a good sense of the grape’s character. Drink a lot of Burgundy, and you start to become familiar with the characteristic nuances of the region - the subtlety, the understated elegance.

The same is true when it comes to understanding the influence of a wine’s maturity. Vertical wine tastings are a fun and satisfying way of experiencing first-hand how vintage conditions and time can combine in different ways to govern the evolution of a particular wine.

What is a vertical tasting?

Vertical wine tastings are structured wine tastings that consist of sampling several different vintages of a wine from the same vineyard and producer. (Whereas horizontal wine tastings sample the same vintage across different vineyards and producers).

Why do a vertical tasting?

For one, wine is a natural product. The juice that goes into the fermentation tanks after harvest will be different from year to year because growers don’t have control over the weather-related growing conditions. A cool spring, a cloudy summer, a rainy fall - all of these will affect the grapes in different ways, leading to a different wine.

Wine is also a living product. Once bottled, it continues to evolve for decades as chemical reactions take place in the bottle, smoothing out the tannins and allowing new flavors to come to the foreground, gradually altering the character of the wine.

Besides being a highly enjoyable and interesting exercise in their own right, vertical tastings are a fantastic way of learning to identify the respective influences of both time and weather, develop your palate, and further your intuitive understanding of wine.

A Quick Recap: What Influences the Flavors of Wine

The main factors that determine a wine’s character are:

• Age: meaning how long the bottle’s been cellared before opening
• Grape variety: like Pinot Noir or Chardonnay
• Terroir: which encompasses the geographic features of climate, soil composition, and terrain.
• Producer practices: or winemaking philosophy, which factor into decisions about yield vineyard management, barrel and yeast selection, blending choices, and so on. In the case of strong local traditions, winemaking philosophy in the vineyards is sometimes included in terroir.

Different combinations of these factors result in wines of different character, each contributing something different to the mix.

By holding many of the above factors constant over different bottles, vertical tastings help you zero in on those elements that do change, notably the maturity of the vintage, and to a slightly lesser extent, the weather during the growing season.

Everything else - grape variety, climate, soil, elevation, producer practices – aside from some small tweaking – is more or less held constant, like a science experiment.

The Tasting

To really get a sense of a bottle’s evolution throughout the years, vertical tastings are best done with at least three different vintages.

A typical bottle holds about 10 tasting servings, so feel free to invite some friends!

Choosing the wine

First, pick out three bottles of different vintages from the same vineyard and winery. Some producers own different fields over a larger area, which can mean slight differences in terroir, or producer practices if the winemaker takes a different approach with different plots.

From time to time, BurgDirect includes vertical tasting bundles in our quarterly newsletters. If you’re interested in trying one, keep an eye out!

Setting things up

If you have the glassware, set out one glass per bottle for every guest you’ve invited (so three glasses per guest if you’re tasting three bottles).

If you don’t have enough glasses, that’s fine too! Just make sure there’s no wine left at the bottom of the glass when you pour the second and third wines.

There are two ways to do the tasting: from youngest to oldest, or oldest to youngest.

Starting with the younger wines and working your way up lets you note the gradual developments that appear with age, but as younger wines are more powerful in fruit and tannin, you might miss some of the subtleties of the older bottles.

The alternative is to start with the older wines, and work your way down to the younger and more intense wines. This approach allows you to taste the differences in the wine more distinctly.

Whichever you choose, the important thing is to stay consistent and taste the wines linearly.

Tasting the wines

(Note: A typical tasting serving is about 2–3 ounces, but you can eyeball it as long as you start with light pours and then go back to top up as needed.)

1. First, pour a small serving into every glass.

2. Swirl the glass and note the color and aroma, then take a sip and reflect on what you’re tasting.

If you like, you can try swishing the wine around in your mouth, or breathing out through your nose to bring the tastes and smells into focus. These are tasting practices that accentuate the flavor of the wine through the powers of retronasal olfaction.

3. Take a few more small sips to really get a sense of the flavor, and feel free to take notes as you go. Which aromas and flavors stand out to you? How smooth or tannic is the wine? Half the fun of a wine tasting is in discussing with your friends, so feel free to share your thoughts!

4. Once you’ve got a sense of the first wine, have a small nibble of a cracker to clear your palate, and then pour the second bottle into your empty glasses. Then repeat the process.

Note: If you have the glassware to pour all of the wines at once, try to leave a small amount in each glass so that you can return a little while later and taste all of them again. Often a little aeration and time in glass will reveal what the same wine might taste like - for better or worse - if given more time to age (a particularly good idea if you have additional bottles of any in your cellar).

The Après-Tasting

After the tasting, it can be fun to compare notes with your friends. That's why you invited them after all! Were you able to notice the effects of aging? Did you have a favorite? See what you agree and disagree on, and where further experimentation might be warranted.

Wine tasting is hungry work, so a little plate of cheese and charcuterie can be a welcome addition after the initial tasting is complete. Feel free to go back to the different wines as you eat, and you might be surprised by how much the character of the wine seems to change when food is introduced into the mix. There’s a reason the French love to pair their wine with food!

Conclusion

Most important of all - make sure you enjoy yourself! Wine tastings are meant to be a thing of joy, so don’t feel the need to take it too seriously!

If you’d like, feel free to check out a few of our other articles that might be helpful background information for your wine tasting. In particular, there’s this article on wine tasting, this article on the different flavors of wine, and this article on the effects of cellaring wine.

If you haven’t collected the needed wines or you’re having trouble finding a shop that holds three different vintages of the same wine, keep an eye out for our quarterly newsletters, which occasionally include offers for readymade vertical tasting bundles. They're a great way to familiarize yourself with a particular region, get some friends together, and, of course, sample some of the finest wines the world has to offer!