Everything but the Cabernet

The blindfold went on and the world shrank to whatever my hands could reach. What they could reach was a small plastic cup with a lid, the kind that holds salad dressing on the side of a takeout order.

I got the lid off. Something came up out of it and I had no idea what it was.

I knew it was familiar. That was the maddening part, familiar the way a name is familiar when it will not come. I sat there with the open cup under my chin and produced nothing at all. When my turn came I said something vague, and I was wrong.

It had rained most of that day. By early evening the fog had settled onto the hill and stayed, and we were on the covered deck at Notre Vue Estate, up above Windsor, with the damp lifting out of the vineyard below and everything already smelling like wet ground and wet wood before the exercise started. We each had our own set of cups, handed over fresh before every round, one scent sealed in each. Nobody could read the room for a clue or watch a neighbor’s face, which I understood later was not an accident.

The people around me were strangers who had bought tickets. They came from lives that had nothing to do with mine and work I never learned the details of, and they had all paid to spend a foggy evening on a deck being shown what they could not smell. Nobody at that table had a reputation to protect. When a person missed one they said so out loud and laughed, and the next cup came around.

I was not an expert being humbled. I had never studied any of it. I lived in Windsor, and wine was just part of the week there. A tasting room in that part of Sonoma County is a bar with tables inside and more tables out on a patio, and it is where people go to meet a friend on a Thursday or spend an hour before dinner. Harvest is a season everybody tracks. A few years of that had left me with a preference for Pinot Noir and Zinfandel out of the Russian River Valley and no idea where the preference came from. I knew I liked wine. That was all I had, and it is about what most guests bring with them through the door at any tasting room anywhere.

The man running the evening moved through it without hesitating. He knew where everyone was sitting. He knew when the quiet meant people were thinking and when it meant they were lost. He had not put on a blindfold, because he had no use for one. Dr. Hoby Wedler has been blind since birth. He took his doctorate in organic chemistry at UC Davis, and somewhere along the way he worked out that the quickest way to teach a sighted person about flavor is to take away the sense they have leaned on their whole life without ever noticing it. He calls the evening Tasting in the Dark, and he has run it at Coppola and at wineries across Napa and Sonoma for years.

So the only person on that deck who could navigate the place was the one teaching. The rest of us had to be told where our glasses were.

He started with mechanics I assumed I already had. I have swirled a glass thousands of times. I had been doing it without thinking about it once. Cover the glass with a palm. Swirl underneath so nothing escapes. Lift the hand and go straight in, short breaths instead of one long pull, because the receptors tire much faster than anybody expects. Then out. Wait. Back in. None of it is complicated, and nobody had ever bothered to tell me.

Then the wines came, unnamed, in an order I did not know, poured into dark glasses so that anybody tempted to work a gap under the blindfold would have nothing to look at anyway.

I got the Cabernet. I caught a distinct, unmistakable scent of tobacco in the dark, and it was the one lifeline that led me to the right answer.

But that was the whole of my success. Everything else I called, I called wrong, and not in the narrow way where somebody says Grenache and it turns out to be Syrah. The fruit was not what I said it was. The oak was somewhere else entirely. I missed wines I had been drinking happily for years and would have bet money on. At one point Hoby corrected me with no ceremony at all, and I knew he was right before he finished saying it. I had been describing what I expected to find rather than what was in the glass.

I had not been tasting wine at all. I had been reading labels and confirming them.

That is not laziness on my part or anybody else’s. It is the order things happen in. A label arrives before the wine does. Varietal, vintage, appellation, producer. Then the glass comes and the mind, which would always rather match a pattern than do the work, goes hunting for what it was already promised. Cassis, because the label says Cabernet. Minerality, because the vineyard sits on a hillside. The wine gets tasted through the paperwork. Take the paperwork away and there is a person holding a glass and a smell they cannot name.

The gap is not knowledge. Every person on that deck could smell what was in the cup. The molecules arrived and the receptors fired and the information got where it was going. What was missing was the word. With nothing to hang it on, the sensation shows up and dissolves, and a person is left with a strong impression of something and nowhere to put it.

Hoby’s whole method is handing over the word in the two seconds when somebody is reaching for it. Not a lecture on aromatic compounds, though he could give one and it would be correct. One word, while the cup is still open. After that the sensation has somewhere to live, and it stays there for years.

A paired dinner followed, and every conversation at it was about what people had missed. Strangers trading failures on a wet deck in the hills, cheerfully, over food, pleased with themselves for having been so thoroughly beaten. Nobody drove home embarrassed. They drove home with words they had not arrived with.

None of that was luck, and it is the part worth stealing. The blindfolds meant nobody could read a bottle. The individual cups meant nobody could borrow a neighbor’s answer. Seating strangers together meant nobody had a face to save. Putting dinner at the end meant the evening had somewhere to settle instead of stopping at the last pour and scattering into a parking lot. Every one of those was a decision somebody made in advance, weeks before any of us bought a ticket. By the time we sat down, the evening had already been built to work, and not one person on that deck could feel the carpentry.

That evening thoroughly humbled me. It exposed exactly how little I actually knew about wine, and just how poorly trained my palate really was. I went home from Windsor and decided to go on a journey to fix that. I signed up for formal wine education and fought my way through it until I earned a WSET Level 3. It was vastly more challenging than most people would think. My palate still isn’t perfect, but it is miles ahead of where it was on that foggy deck. Yet, the certification matters less than the reason I chased it. Liking wine and understanding it turned out to be two different things, and I had spent years assuming they were the same.