Fun and games for the professional
and novice
CLIVE HARTLEY
AUSTRALIANS love sport and games. It is part of our culture; and it was an integral part of our citizenship test, until the Rudd Government removed it. At social gatherings it can take the form of Sunday afternoon backyard cricket or a game of two-up on Anzac Day. The agenda is competition, usually a bet, and a winner.
Unlike one-upmanship beer drinkers, the average wine imbiber is not interested in drinking his or her companions under the table. So what sport can we get out of wine? It's an important question, as any game that brings wine down from its lofty, highbrow status and lets people enjoy and have fun with it will result in a larger, appreciative audience.
Hands-down, the most commonly used game is wine options. You need at least six or eight people around a table, or in a backyard, and it can be as simple or complex as you want to make it. But the joy is that you don't need any wine knowledge to play or win.
The late Len Evans OBE is credited with coming up with the idea. Wine options started in Sydney when some of the ‘boys' went back to Len's home after a big Chateau Tahbilk tasting. Len picks up the story: "I went down to the cellar, picked a bottle, decanted it and instead of saying, ‘What is it?' I said,‘Is it French or American; where the word option came from I cannot say."
During his time at the Chevron Hilton and, as patron of Bulletin Place in Sydney, Len hosted a regular options game at the Monday Table ‘Club' with wine identities such as James Halliday and John Beeston. The classic game consisted of a set of five questions starting with the general and moving to the more specific. Each player takes a turn at presenting a wine to the other players. A starting options question could be about the wine' nationality, progressing to asking questions about the variety, age and, finally, the region and producer.
At home you can organise the wine, or invite other people to bring a bottle, but keep it masked. Masking the wines, so the label is hidden, makes you assess the wine on its merit alone. The wine's reputation, or your prejudice about a region or a grape variety, is immediately removed. It makes you concentrate on the aromas and flavours of the wine. Asking the questions is simple and does not require vast wine knowledge; often you just need to read the front and back labels. Alternatively, you could make it educational to your friends by giving tips and advice. So when you ask a question such as, "Is this wine a riesling or a chardonnay?", you could comment that young riesling generally smells of lemons or limes or floral, while chardonnay is often more tropical with peach and melon, and can smell buttery or oaky.
Wine options can be played with large audiences and is a popular after-dinner activity. Guests are asked to stand up and they either raise their hand to vote on the right answer or rub their tummy or some other embarrassing act! If they get it wrong they sit down and are out of the competition. Alternatively, if you feel the urge for a slight wager, then each player could start with a few dollars worth of 50c pieces and for each question they get wrong they lose a coin into the kitty. This way you stay in the game and the winner, who takes the kitty, is the person with the most money left after all the wines have been tried.
The wine samples should be chosen with care to suit the group, and not be ‘left field' examples that no one would pick. The Monday Table players at Bulletin Place had this problem early on and restricted wines of this nature to an annual ‘Deviates' Day where Russian champagne and Lebanese cabernets made their appearance. So you might restrict the wines to Australia, if you have a mixed audience with differing levels of wine knowledge.
If you decide on playing an options game over dinner it is a good idea to serve the wines from decanters or simply a water jug. This will avoid giving away clues to the wines' identity by exposing the bottle shape. Screw cap or cork-sealed bottles are all little clues that can be useful to competitive diners.
Does this all sound too hard? Do you feel you should leave it to the experts? Take heart. In well documented trails done at the University of California's Department of Viticulture and Oenology, only 39 per cent of trained tasters could identify cabernet sauvignon and just 14 per cent correctly identified merlot! Professor and Sensory Scientist Dr Ann C. Noble notes that the amateur tasters sometimes have a better hit-rate because they have less experience and therefore a clear-cut decision is made easier. The master wine tasters have a vast memory database to consider and can easily get confused.