How to hold a vertical or horizontal tasting

What stays still, and what moves

Every comparative tasting works the same way: whatever you hold still becomes the background, and the one thing you let move becomes the lesson.

	Vertical	Horizontal
What stays the same	The wine: same estate, same label	The vintage, and usually the region
What changes	The year	The estate
What it teaches	What each year did, and how the wine ages	How each estate handled the same weather
A Bordeaux example	One château in 4 successive vintages	Pauillac (opens in a new tab), Saint-Julien (opens in a new tab), Margaux (opens in a new tab), and Saint-Estèphe (opens in a new tab) from one year, at the same tier

A horizontal can also hold the grape still and move the place. In Bordeaux terms, that is a Merlot-based Pomerol (opens in a new tab) beside a Merlot (opens in a new tab) from somewhere else, both of the same vintage.

Why Bordeaux makes both easy

Bordeaux makes both formats easy because its names are fixed. A château’s grand vin (its top wine) comes from the same estate year after year, so a vertical isolates the vintage. Its appellations sit side by side under one sky, so a horizontal of the 4 Médoc (opens in a new tab) communes in a single year isolates the soil. The same summer, 4 different places.

A third format sits between the 2: a grand vin and its second wine from the same vintage. Same estate, same year, same cellar team. The only difference is the selection.

Six steps to a fair tasting

Choose the variable. For a first vertical, 3 or 4 vintages of one wine, ideally successive years. For a horizontal, 4 wines of the same vintage and the same tier. Take 4 classified growths of 1855, or 4 Crus Bourgeois (opens in a new tab) (the Médoc’s ranking of the estates outside the 1855 list), not a mix of both.

Gather the facts. Many producers publish a technical sheet for each vintage on their websites, with the weather of the growing season, the blend, and the winemaking. Print them, and keep them face down until after the first round.

Prepare the bottles. Serve all the reds at the same temperature, so that temperature does not become a second variable. For a structured Bordeaux, the CIVB (opens in a new tab), the Bordeaux wine council, recommends 16 to 18 °C (61 to 64 °F). Stand older bottles upright for a day or 2 and decant them off their sediment; decant younger ones early enough to take air.

Count the pours. A standard 750 ml bottle gives 12 pours of about 60 ml (2 ounces). With 6 people and 4 wines, each bottle gives everyone one pour and keeps half back for a second look later in the evening, after an hour or 2 of air.

Pick an order and keep it. Old to young or young to old: what matters is that the order is the same for everyone and follows the variable.

Go blind if you can. Wrap each bottle in a paper bag or a sock, number it, and let one person hold the list. The label cannot steer a note it cannot see.

The note that teaches

For each wine, write the color, then the nose, then the palate, then one sentence on how it differs from its neighbor. That last sentence is the one that matters.

A note that could describe any Bordeaux teaches nothing. A note that says wine 2 has firmer tannin than wine 1 and less fruit than wine 3 is the lesson.