There are people that say that they can taste a variety of flavors in wine, from chocolate and nuts all the way to raspberries and wood. I am decidedly not one of those people.
My first proper experience with alcohol was cheap red wine after my final exams, and that ended so disastrously that I haven’t touched wine since. In fact, the closest I can get to wine is a glass of champagne on New Years, and even then that’s drunk grudgingly.
So that brings us to the main question, is there any basis to wine tastings or is it ‘a load of wank’. Here’s the thing, there are insurance companies that have approved insurance policies for the senses of certain wine tasters. According to, The Telegraph, ”But none is as valuable as the taste buds of Mrs Mount, a 40-year-old mother of three who is senior wine buyer at Somerfield. The supermarket chain has insured Mrs Mount’s “olfactory system” for the cork-popping sum of £10m, saying she is responsible for increasing wine sales 15pc last year.”
Now one would assume that since a company is willing to insure their employee for so much money, and an insurance company is willing to approve that then there must be some basis to this “I can actually tastes things in wine” claim. This is not the only case of a wine tasters senses being insured, way back in the dark times of 2008 another wine taster took out his own claim.
According to NBC news, “His schnoz is not to be sniffed at. The nose of leading European winemaker and taster Ilja Gort has been insured for $8 million, Lloyd’s of London said Tuesday”. This is not a company insuring an employee, this is an individual man making the choice to insure his own nose. He claims he made this decision, after ” hearing about a man who lost his sense of smell in a car accident”.
That being said, what does that mean for the average person? Well there’s nothing wrong with going to a wine tasting. It makes a nice date, makes you feel like an adult and honestly any opportunity to play “wanky wine expert” is a good time. Make it a game with your friends, try and make the weirdest description with a straight face.
At the end of the day, wine tastings may be a load of wank, but then again most things in life are, so why not go along for the ride and try and have a bit of fun at the same time?
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