Sharpen those blind-tasting buds with these great tips

Winemaker Chris Groenewald led the South African blind-tasting team in the international championships for the second time last year. He shared some blind-tasting tips with Glenneis Kriel.

- Glenneis Kriel

Terracura Wines, in Cape Town’s Northern Suburbs, is buzzing with activity in preparation for the harvest, which is two weeks early. Chris Groenewald, co-owner and winemaker of Terracura, is juggling this interview while selling wine, putting wax on bottles and directing repairs on the cellar’s cooling system that broke the day before.

Despite all the chaos, Groenewald remains calm, a characteristic that is of utmost importance if you captain the South African blind-tasting team in the World Blind Tasting Competition, as he did at Château Sainte-Roseline in Provence, France, in 2023, and at Chateauneuf du Pape in the Rhone wine region in 2021.

The South African team is selected based on their performance during the South African Blind Wine Tasting Championship, with the winner being appointed as captain. Each team comprises four tasters and a coach.

But what exactly does a blind-tasting competition entail? The objective is to identify the wine you are tasting without seeing the label. In the World Blind Tasting Competition, teams are given 12 wines and receive points for identifying the grape variety, or varieties if it is a blend, country of origin, appellation, vintage, and producer of each wine.

Groenewald says last year’s competition, in which 33 countries competed, was particularly tough. The Romanian team, which won, only scored 108 points, which is the lowest score achieved by the winner since the start of the competition in 2013.

The event was also very competitive. Romania beat the Netherlands by only one point. Denmark took third place with 95 points and France was fourth with 90 points. South Africa came ninth, with only a 20-point difference to Romania.