57 varieties of rose Champagne

Spent the morning tasting rose Champagnes blind. 57 of them were lined up for a Wine & Spirit tasting held at the WSET, and it proved a rather demanding session. The problem with these sorts of blind tastings is that it's really hard to keep your concentration at the right level for the duration, and also that your palate can become quite fatigued.

But, providing you can stay in the zone (as David Williams clearly is above) and give your mouth the odd break, tasting lots of the same sort of wine like this in a blind format is quite illuminating. You get to spot subtle differences between the wines that you might miss if you just had one or two bottles in front of you. You get a broad-brush perspective of the category. And not having sight of the label can prevent those subtle biases that we're all prone to. There are weaknesses with this format, too, but those are its strengths.

The 57 wines were a mixed bag. Perhaps half a dozen were unpleasant, and another half a dozen were exceptional, but then there was a big cluster of very good but not world-beating wines in the middle. Interesting to see the range of colours, too - again, some were quite dark pink, most were salmon pink, and then there were a few that had hardly any colour at all. I'll get the names of the wines together with my notes in a few days, so I can write them up here.