Try a Vertical Tasting

One of the best (and most fun) things you can do when getting into wine is to try a vertical tasting. This is where you taste (usually) three wines from the same producer, variety, vineyard, etc. from three different vintages. Usually you try to do three consecutive vintages, but that isn't necessary. I had the opportunity to do this in a wine class and was amazed by the differences.

If you think about this for a minute, conducting a vertical tasting is somewhat difficult. First, you have to find the three vintages. Typically, you can only buy the most recent vintage from a producer. You'll have to work a bit to hunt down the bottles or cellar them with a plan to do the tasting in the future. One trick is to look at bottles on the back of the shelf at your wine shop. If someone missed rotating the old bottles to the front, you can (rarely) find one from a previous vintage. The other issue is that it can be expensive and you have three bottles of wine to drink. While you can try to preserve them, you'll still have to drink them in the next couple of days. So it is best to have some friends to share the cost and fun!

The reason this is a really interesting thing to do is to begin to understand what age can do to a wine. You'll also see that the grapes have a huge impact on the wine. Was it a hot year? Did the particular vintage have a lot of rain? These things have a significant influence on the wine despite what the wine maker can do to control for consistency.

Give a vertical tasting a try to refine your palate and discover the differences. Gary Vaynerchuk did one on a episode of Wine Library TV. You can see his experience below: