blind tasting, form of wine tasting in which the taster attempts to evaluate and/or identify wines without knowing their identity. Only by blind tasting can a true assessment of a wine’s style and quality be made, so subjective is the wine-tasting process. Many professional tastings, those designed to make significant judgements about quality and possibly value, are therefore conducted blind. A comparative tasting, for example, comprises a group of wines of the same approximate age and provenance served blind together in order to evaluate them without prejudicial knowledge of their identity.
