If you follow my blathering on Twitter, you may have already seen the above tweet. It stemmed from what should have been a polite conversation over lunch, but it ended up being a rather tense exchance which left me rather riled up. You see, a reputed wine educator from one of Italy’s top sommelier schools casually mentioned the fact that he teaches his students not to spit out wine when at a tasting. Just those words alone almost had me spit out a mouthful of wine across the table!
In his opinion, you only get the ‘full tasting experience’ when you swallow. Now, he’s not wrong…. because the retrolfactory notes that you lose out on if you don’t imbibe are important, but it’s surely more important that you can get to the end of a day’s worth of tasting and not be hobbling home, cross-eyed and dim-witted. Spitting is good practice.
In need of reassurance from a woman who rarely ever minced her words, I consulted Pamela Vandyke Price, certain that she would have something to say on the matter…. and as it just so happens, her dictionary entry is pure gold.
“SPITTING: It often astonishes people that those whose business is wine spit out more than they swallow when they are sampling. But it must be so: to taste 100 or more wines – my master would taste up to 300 in a day – would be quite impossible unless the samples were spat out. Some of the wines may not be attractive anyway: many – as far as fine wines are concerned – are certainly not enjoyable to drink if tasted while they are young. Also any wine undergoing the process of fermentation will go on fermenting in the stomach if it is swallowed…
When I was beginning to learn about wine, I was told that the way to learn to spit was to lie in the bath and try to hit one’s feet. It is possible to spit tidily: take only a little wine into the mouth and, when you want to eject this, push it out, making a sort of funnel with the tongue and sending the breath behind it. Don’t just open the mouth – if you do, you must lean over the spittoon to avoid splashing. Keep your head up because, if you bend your neck, you will almost certainly miss the spittoon and possibly spit onto your own feet.
Although many modern tasting rooms provide individual spittoons into which the taster can silently eject the wine, it is impressive to see someone who really can spit do so. On some occasions I have known people spit over the shoulders of those who were blocking the spittoon. The port trade possibly spit better than any other branch of the wine business, though I do not know why. Can it be because the additional viscosity of the port makes a long trajectory easier to achieve?
One establishment in Gaia has a spittoon running underneath the tasting bench, so that it is necessary to stand back and project the wine into this from afar (unless you cower down and bend your head). It was the chief taster of this establishment who is supposed to have established the record – 11ft 6 in (3.5m) – that still stands for spitting, and there is a photograph to prove his feat.”
Extract from “Dictionary of Wines and Spirits” by Pamela Vandyke Price, published 1986.
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