How to Find a Tasting Group
How to Find a Tasting Group
Section titled “How to Find a Tasting Group”
You can study theory alone and drill flashcards alone, but you cannot become a good blind taster alone — not efficiently. Tasting by yourself, you have no way to catch your own biases, no one to pour wines you did not choose, and no pressure to commit to a call out loud. A tasting group solves all three at once. It is the single highest-leverage habit most CMS candidates are missing, and unlike most study resources, it costs little beyond time and a shared bottle budget.
Why the group multiplies your practice
Section titled “Why the group multiplies your practice”Alone, you taste the wines you buy, which means you taste the styles you already like and think you know. A group pours blind for you, so you meet wines you would never have chosen — the ones that expose your gaps. Just as important, describing a wine out loud to peers forces you to reason in public, and peers will challenge a call you would have let slide in private. The disagreement is the value. When four people read the same acid three different ways, you learn how unreliable your solo calibration was.
Where these groups actually exist
Section titled “Where these groups actually exist”| Source | How to use it |
|---|---|
| Coworkers in beverage roles | The easiest start — a few colleagues who also study. |
| Local wine shops and distributors | Many host or know of tasting groups and trade sessions. |
| CMS course cohorts | Classmates from a course are natural, motivated partners. |
| Industry associations and sommelier chapters | Local trade groups often run structured tastings. |
| Online communities | Useful for finding local people, coordinating, and sharing flights. |
Start with the people already around you before searching wider. Two committed coworkers who show up weekly beat a large group that meets sporadically. If nothing exists near you, the fastest fix is to start one yourself — post in a local industry channel, pick a time, and commit to hosting the first few sessions.
What makes a group worth attending
Section titled “What makes a group worth attending”A tasting group can easily degrade into a wine party, and a wine party teaches nothing. The groups that build exam skill share a few traits: wines are poured genuinely blind, everyone commits to a full structured note before discussion, people call the wine out loud, and the bottle is revealed and debriefed. Set that expectation early. It is friendlier to agree on the format up front than to fight the drift toward socializing later.
Running a session that pays off
Section titled “Running a session that pays off”- Have one person pour a set of wines blind so tasters cannot see labels or bottles.
- Everyone completes a full structured tasting note before anyone speaks.
- Go around and state conclusions out loud, with the evidence behind each.
- Reveal each bottle and debrief — where did the group agree, where did it split, and why.
- Each taster writes one personal correction to carry into the next session.
Keeping it going
Section titled “Keeping it going”The hard part of a tasting group is not starting it; it is sustaining it. Rotate who pours so the cost and effort spread out. Keep a consistent day and time so it becomes a fixture rather than a negotiation. Theme sessions occasionally — a flight of one grape across climates, or one region across producers — so the practice targets known weak spots. A group that meets reliably every week for a season will do more for your tasting than any book, because it supplies the one thing solo study cannot: honest, repeated, external feedback on calls you had to make out loud.