How Do You Prepare for a Wine Tasting Competition?

By Laura Conde, wine writer

Wine enthusiasts are signing up for wine tasting competitions in growing numbers, from the popular Vila Viniteca contest in pairs to the Campeonato de España de Cata por Equipos in which participants compete in teams.  Some contestants have been participating diligently for years, whereas others sign up sporadically, usually encouraged by friends or colleagues. To find out what’s behind this growing trend and how participants prepare for these competitions, we spoke to two contestants to hear about their experience firsthand. 

Glasses with different wines at a tasting

A Combination of Training and Fun

Santi Rivas, wine critic and member of @colectivodecantado, is a familiar face at competitions: as a two-time finalist and third-place winner, he has landed top spots in Vila Viniteca’s pair contest, and in the Campeonato de España de Cata por Equipos, where he won first place, second place, and fourth place (twice), on separate occasions.  For Rivas, the key to taking home that trophy not only lies in a solid training method, but also in having a good connection with your partner or team.

“You don’t have to be exceptionally gifted or have an amazing palate; that’s something you can train,” he explains, “What matters is exercising your memory and building the relationship with your partner. That you know how to taste is a given, what it comes down to is how you manage the decision-making process. For instance, one partner might think it’s a Garnacha, whereas the other is convinced it’s a Tempranillo. How do you resolve this difference?” For Rivas, one of the reasons for his success is precisely his excellent relationship with his tasting partner, Jaime Fernández, with whom he has been tasting since 2010. In addition to being wine world partners in crime, they are also friends.  

His training approach involves doing blind tastings with friends, simulating the conditions of an actual contest. “Starting at Christmas, we start training systematically, because the contests are in spring,” Rivas explains, “During the rest of the year, we do it out of habit, because we enjoy it, but then it’s not methodical, it’s just simply and purely for fun.” In a blind tasting, all the participants bring bottles for the others in the round to taste. They have to guess the variety, region, vintage, winery, and – if the opportunity presents itself – the specific wine. 

Blind-tasting practice runs not only train the palate to recognize varieties and identify their nuances, but also clearly reveal the dynamics that develop between tasting partners or teams. “It is important to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. For example, my partner knows that I’m a whiz at identifying Syrah but am prone to confusing Garnachas. During these training sessions, we play out the decision-making process: who prevails, who gives in, and how do we handle criticism when we make mistakes. If you want to compete with the same person again, you can’t blame them for an error.”

Differences between Contests

The pair tasting hosted by Vila Viniteca has one distinctive feature: the wines presented during the contest are all part of their inventory, which means it’s a “finite universe” of possibilities. Although Vila Viniteca stocks a lot of wines – more than 2,500 – this does provide the possibility of studying them, something that might help the most methodical of contestants.

“We don’t review the Vila Viniteca wine list directly, but we do select bottles that we know they distribute,” Rivas states, “By contrast, the Campeonato de España doesn’t have a list, any wine could be included in the contest. The points system tilts far more towards grape and country of origin, so it’s a different type of challenge.”

In addition, the Vila Viniteca competition does not allow for bathroom breaks during its 90-minute duration, a detail that can sometimes slip participants’ minds and, as Rivas says, “Turn into a nightmare. Once I spent the entire hour and a half only thinking about how badly I had to go to the bathroom and that wrecks your concentration.”

A Beginner’s Perspective

Not all contestants have years of experience under their belt. Rosa Molinero, a food writer and regular contributor to news outlets like La Vanguardia, El Periódico, and El País, made her first foray into the world of tasting competitions at Vila Viniteca, and although she has only participated in one edition, she is open to doing it again. Like Rivas, she believes that having a keen sense of taste isn’t the only factor – practice is what matters most in these types of competitions. “For me, a blind tasting is a question of training, it’s about developing the ability to relate a sensory experience to a concept. For example, you can learn that the smell of petrol is associated with the Riesling grape. This isn’t a gift; it’s something you learn.”

She took a more relaxed approach to her contest preparation, taking advantage of every meal or meeting with friends to blind taste wines. “Doing a blind tasting with your friends is something I recommend to everyone. You really notice the progress you make. At first, you really have no idea, but after several tastings, your senses get attuned,” Molinero explains, who insists on the importance of “creating tasting groups with people who you’re comfortable with and where you aren’t embarrassed to make guesses.”  

Molinero coincides with Rivas that the relationship to your tasting partner is paramount. Training separately won’t do much good if, at the moment of truth, the communication between the partners fails or they lose their cool.  “You have to know your partner. You have to know where they tend to make mistakes, their strengths, and how to communicate your impressions to them calmly yet assertively. On the day of the competition tensions are high, because you’re nervous, the venue is cold, you can’t go to the bathroom.” Rivas agrees, “The worst thing you can do is blame each other for mistakes that were made. This has ruined friendships between tasting partners.”
 

More Than Varieties and Provenance

For Molinero, the most complicated aspect of blind tastings is identifying specific wineries. “I don’t work in the wine world, so I don’t have as deep a knowledge base as someone who does, making it hard to know if a wine originates from one winery or another even though I am able to identify the variety and region,” she explains. Rivas, however, finds this part just as simple (or complicated) as the rest. “Being able to identify a winery is also a matter of training. It’s important to remember that every winery has a specific style, a way of making wine that can be easily identifiable,” he states, “But you have to keep track of all of these styles in your head.” 

Barrel tasting

That said, people often get things outrageously wrong, which is all part of the adventure, and something you might even laugh about in the future. “One time, a winemaker was unable to recognize his own wine,” Molinero recalls. Rivas also remembers more than a few glorious mishaps: “They gave us a Salon champagne to taste, which costs 1,000 euros, and I mistook it for a regular-quality 30-euro cava,” he admits. In any case, climate change is presenting wine tasters with new challenges. “I struggled to identify Garnachas from southern France, I couldn’t tell them apart from Spanish ones,” Molinero explains, “We have to keep in mind that climate change is altering the way certain varieties taste – they no longer display their canonical flavour profile, and this complicates things further.”