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Every wine geek feels obligated to instruct their friends on how to conduct a fun-filled home wine tasting. Here's the Eno File's advice:
1.
Invite a group of people you dislike, so you can ridicule their tastes. If you mortally offend your guests and they never speak to you again, so what?
2.
Forgo familiar wines such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, or Zinfandel, and instead select varieties like Scuppernong, Muller-Thurgau, or Plavac Mali, which no one has ever heard of, let alone tasted. This will completely befuddle your guests and allow you to display your encyclopedic knowledge of the wine world.
3.
Make the tasting "blind" -- i.e., brown-bag the wines so only you know what they are. After convincing everyone your dog bagged the bottles, proceed to guess correctly the identity of each wine, impressing the other tasters with your brilliance.
4.
Be sure to offer an array of tasty snacks to keep your guests' palates cleansed. The Eno File recommends Cheese Puffs, Pork Rinds, Ding-Dongs and Twinkies. When your friends wake in the middle of the night sick as dogs, they'll blame the food, not the wine.
5.
At the conclusion of the tasting, insist that the group rank the wines in order of preference. Tabulate the scores, announce the results, and discuss each wine. This can be amusing -- for example, when the top-ranked wine is revealed and Fred says, "I love that wine!" and you say: "That's curious, Fred, you ranked it last."
6.
Before they leave, ask your guests to fork over $20 each to cover the cost of the wines. With the profit you accrue from having actually acquired them for free from a friend in the business, buy a case of really good wine. By doing this on a regular basis, you can assemble a library of excellent wines you will never have to share with anyone.
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