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Confessions of a wine-taster – all that sipping, sniffing, swilling and spitting really takes it out of you

As Burgundy growers gather for their annual showcase of en primeur wines, Andrew Neather says ‘palate fatigue’ is real – and can leave a professional taster hankering for a nice cool beer

Friday 19 January 2024 14:18 GMT

Sampling 30 wines is equivalent to downing a full glass (Getty/iStock)

Many in the British wine trade will breathe a sigh of relief today, following the annual Burgundy en primeur tasting – at least 15 of them organised by different importers, crammed into less than two weeks, four on some days.

But there will be little respite for wine critics before the gruelling portfolio tasting of big importer Liberty, the Australian national tasting, the big St Emilion London event – and a slew of others.

I know: I’m straining to hear the tiniest violins playing in sympathy.

It says much about Brits’ attitudes to alcohol that a large majority are genuinely incapable of imagining a wine tasting as anything less than a p***-up. Sizeable tastings, several times a week, and free as well? Don’t think of even suggesting to friends or family that this might be tiring – or, indeed, even work at all.

You’re essentially moaning to them: “Why do people keep showering me with free booze?” Which sounds about the same as harrumphing: “All my girlfriend wants is sex, sex and more sex – it’s exhausting, so inconsiderate!”

Yet trade wine tasting is physically tiring work. My current day job limits the number I can get to, and I skip plenty anyway that don’t really interest me – such as those held two or three times a year by each of the major supermarkets. But I know from my years as the London Evening Standard’s wine critic that if you write a regular column based on recommendations, bluntly, you need to taste a lot of product to keep a flow of suitable wines moving into print.

How much is that? An average supermarket tasting will show well over 100 wines: long lines of bottles stretching away on long tables. Even ignoring a fair few, you’re still tasting and spitting a minimum of, say, 70-plus wines each time.

These events can be bigger: when I first started as a critic in the mid-2000s, Waitrose tastings were notorious for featuring around 300 wines. At the big importers, it’s usually in the hundreds too. Liberty’s twice-yearly portfolio tastings are spread over two floors of the Oval cricket ground; not only are there up to 400 wines, but the whole place is jam-packed with critics, buyers and sommeliers, plus pub and restaurant owners out for the day. That one is frankly not much fun.

Even in a calmer environment, tasting that many wines can be, well, knackering. When spitting every taste, you still absorb some alcohol through the mucous membranes of your mouth. Jancis Robinson MW reckons 30 spits equals roughly a glass – except that after four glasses of wine, I feel happy, whereas after 120 tastes and spits, I just feel washed out.

Meanwhile your taste buds get tired. The scientific reasons for this are disputed: but palate fatigue is real, especially when tasting reds. I know it’s kicking in when I start to “aim off”: I’m aware roughly what a given wine should taste like and start to lean on that expectation harder than I should, to compensate for my dulled palate. The maximum I can realistically taste before my palate is shot – if it’s a roughly half-and-half mix of whites and reds – is around 80.

Not for nothing is a key phrase early in the six-language Winemaker’s Essential Phrasebook: “I would really like a beer.”

I remember at the first big tasting I attended – an Oddbins spring event in a large upstairs pub room in west London – I was starting to feel overwhelmed even by early on in the reds. Perhaps I was looking green at the gills, because wine critic Oz Clarke – to his credit, as he didn’t know me then – reassured me: “Have a glass of water – or go and walk around outside for five minutes. You’ll be fine!”

This is also, in part, why big and powerful reds tend to do better at mammoth competition tastings like the ones for which Australia is famous. A bigger wine has got more chance of punching through to get the attention of a jaded judge who has already tasted 200 others.

Still, we carry on tasting. It’s not just that for most critics – though not me, at present – sipping and spitting wine is a job. Even after you’ve spent decades tasting tens of thousands of bottles, wine still has the capacity to surprise. It can still seem magical. And I love talking to producers about their wines: the farmer’s view of what’s in your glass.