The days leading up to Paso Robles Wine Festival were laden with wonder. I wonder if it’ll be roasting hot again this year for the park. I wonder if the people will show up. I wonder how busy we’ll be. At home, I take the pressure off of a big weekend like this by singing “It’s Festival time again” in a Frank Sinatra meets Will Ferrel imitating Robert Goulet sort of way. I know, I’m a bit weird. But if you’ve lived through festival weekends in the tasting room, you know you have to have a sense of humor about it all. It’s crazy.

So, Friday I took advantage of tickets my company had to get into the Reserve tasting in the park. I tried about 20-ish wines from all three sections, favoring the Reserve and Library wines side of the park. It was still roasting hot outside, but I enjoyed myself because I ran into a friend from school and because I was able to visit Andrew & Nicole at their table in the park too. Followed up by a margarita and a fantastic dinner at Thomas Hill Organics, I was charged up and ready for the festival weekend.

Saturday – the big dance. Typically this is the busiest day for us, and we would have SanTasti at the tasting room to help keep the folks pouring in cleansed before they hit our bar. One thing I love about having Nicole and Andrew at the tasting room is that everyone seems to stop and chat for a couple of minutes, and when they get to us, not only are they REALLY ready to taste, but they have great comments about the product, the idea, and the creators. Number one comment – “what a smart idea…and it works!” We know.

It was a pretty crazy day in the tasting room, but much more manageable than in the past. Typically for festival weekends we hit what I call “3-deep”, meaning that’s the number of bodies that get stacked into our tasting room to get their hands on the good juice. This festival, not so much. We barely hit “2-deep”….but our sales were fantastic. And, we did pretty darn well on selling SanTasti so folks could keep-on-keep-on-keep-on-keep-on-tastin’ on down the road…(I’m telling you, festival weekend makes you sing weird songs).

Now that the bulk of festivals are over (until October), I’m personally looking forward to getting back on the road and distributing for the team. What the people gotta know is that there is something to help make them smile…when wine tasting. Summer, here we come!!!

Just a couple of weeks ago, I experienced an “out of the tasting room” pouring event called Hospice du Rhone (a.k.a. HdR). Last year I was at this event in a volunteer capacity, and was amazed at the turnout of people. This event features wines made from Rhone varietals, and there are 22 types of grapes that are allowed in wines from the Rhone area of France. HdR brings winemakers from across the world, and my tasting experience, which I’ll get to in a bit, spanned from Paso Robles, California to Sonoita, Arizona to the Cote Rotie and Chateauneuf du Pape regions in France.

I was excited to be on the pouring/winery side of the table for Denner Vineyards this year and interact with a lot of people trying our wines. We also had bottles of SanTasti chilled and ready to pour for folks because lots of tasting = ripe opportunity to have a dead palate. The doors were opened and in came the event attendees. It seemed to me that this year’s attendance was down. I remembered last year and since the table we were pouring at was right in range of seeing people walk into the hall we all were in, I could tell there were less people. All the same, we kept busy and we were slinging SanTasti to just about everyone that walked up to us. I kept politely insisting “please cleanse your palate before we start tasting.” And they did. Some would say “Oh yea! I need that!” or “Oh, how does this work?” with curiosity and/or enthusiasm about something new.

If I could tell they just had a red wine (the glass never lies) and they wanted to try our white I would say “Let’s get your palate cleansed and reset to go back to white” and everyone would and many would say “Oh! That’s great. I do feel clean.” We know.

Andrew & Nicole were busy. I escaped our table to taste a bit and I carried a whole bottle just for me around. I wanted a clean palate, and a little guerrilla marketing never hurt anyone. Wines from Paso Robles, Arizona and even from France, all tasted great. I blew through 10 tables in about an hour…about 30 wines tasted without a hitch. And, I really don’t mean for this to sound like a commercial, but now more than ever, I wonder how in the world it is that people taste anything after wine 5, 6, 7 or beyond without this palate cleanser.

HdR was great – the lower attendee count meant elbow room for everyone, which gave everyone time to try wines and interact more with wineries pouring…which, as a consumer education fanatic, was great to see and experience. 6 pm was cutoff time and we had our “test patron” come at 6:03 asking for wine to which I declined to pour. There was no way I was going to jeopardize our and HdR’s licenses to pour – she could have been from the ABC. Frank and I packed up and booked SanTasti to pour at our tasting room on the Saturday of Wine Festival for a demo…we can’t get enough of the stuff! And me? I’m all about enhancing the consumer’s opportunity to learn more through a clean palate.

Last week Nicole and I spent some time up in Sonoma County to demo SanTasti for some barrel tastings. Needless to say, we had a lot of fun pouring the new SanTasti for everyone at Harvest Moon and Hop Kiln wineries. The weekend was an overall success for both of the wineries with hundreds of people coming out to sample the wines. These barrel tasting events are a bargain for the weekend wine warriors. For about 20 bucks you get to go around to all of the participating wineries and taste a couple of wines out of the barrel and what’s behind the bar and in the bottle. On top of that, the wineries usually provide food that pairs with what is being tasted out of the barrel. It’s a great deal for those on a budget and usually a great time to join a wine club or two to take advantage of some special offers.

We poured SanTasti for a lot of people over the weekend and we were very excited to see that people are really starting to understand the value of our product and a cleansed palate as they were grabbing four packs left and right. We really appreciate the support and enthusiasm from all the tasters over the weekend who gave us the opportunity to show them the who, what, why, and how’s of SanTasti. It’s all a part of the educational process of highlighting how SanTasti is not water, it’s a palate cleanser.

One of our new SanTasti friends took this picture of Nicole and I. if anyone else has any SanTasti sightings please send them in to info@santasti.com. Thanks William, it was a pleasure meeting you too!

Nicole Chamberlain and Andrew Macaluso with SanTasti in Sonoma

A quick heads up. I spent the weekend at Harvest Moon right next to the barrel of 2007 Zinfandel. This Zin was coming out fantastic out of the barrel. It is a four vineyard blend from vines within two miles of Harvest Moon in the Russian River Valley. The fun part was tasting the 07 out of the barrel and then trying the 06 out of the bottle. SanTasti really came in handy hear when tasting out of the barrel because unfinished wines are… well, unfinished for lack of a better word. I’m really looking forward to the 07 Zin. They will be bottling in July and releasing the vintage in October if my mental notes are correct.

To wind it up I’d like to say check back often for more blog posts. More of us will be posting in the near future. Lastly, for those who have signed up for the newsletter, it’s coming soon. I promise.

Thanks all you SanTastians,

-Andrew

Hello everyone! I am very excited to begin the SanTásti blog with our first post. The purpose of this blog will be multifaceted with commentary and news on everything from winetasting, winemaking, brewing, baking, cooking, and just about anything flavor related. We will have multiple contributors from various people in the wine and food business who are in one way or another a part of the SanTásti team.

Ok, now that we are introduced it’s time for the first post. How many times have you or one of your friends tasted a wine and THEN asked if it was any good? An article on globeandmall.com was recently brought to my attention. The title of this article, “DECANTER: TASTE TEST: INEPT WINE JUDGES EXPOSED,” would definitely be hard for a lot of wine professionals to swallow. The results are worth looking into and acting upon.

When wine judges were slipped three identical wines in the same flight the study found that “judges rarely gave identical, or even close, scores to the same drink.“ How far off were they, you ask… try a “mere 10 per cent of judges regularly ranked a wine within the same medal category.”

The Prestigious SanTasti Wine Tasting Gold Medal

What does this mean? Plainly and simply it means that the medals that are generally awarded aren’t worth their weight in gold, silver, or bronze. Why is this happening? The author of the article gives a list of the potential causes such as the subjectivity of taste, the numeric scoring system itself, and my personal favorite… palate fatigue. It is in the dismissal of palate fatigue by the authors of the study that I disagree.

Palate fatigue is something sensory enthusiasts and professionals have to combat continuously. The professional tasters are aware of it. I know first hand. Last year Nicole and I were fortunate enough to be chosen as guest judges at the Orange County Wine Festival. (see wine tasting montage here). The gentleman in the kilt was particularly entertaining… but I’ll have to save that for another post. Being Cal Poly Wine and Viticulture Students at the time on the verge of graduation, we were continuously approached by the other judges who just wanted to say hi and/or offer us crush jobs. But more often than not, they would mention palate fatigue and how “its something you have to compensate for.” We would be asked over and over again “how many wines does it take for you to get palate fatigue?” This of course killed us because we wanted to tell them all about this awesome new product we were about to bring to market called SanTásti.

These judges were faced with a tsunami of wine. And each judge offered their own unique way of cleansing the palate. Some of these were as simple as drinking some water (your choice of sparkling or still), bread, roast beef, or even a nice cold Coors Light. Some judges don’t use anything. As you can clearly see, THERE IS NO STANDARD. And they have to go through that wine at neck break speeds. Nicole and I were routinely lapped as the judges would take on one flight after another. We were impressed, but we knew that after tasting a couple hundred wines you aren’t tasting much unless you are cleansing your palate and taking mental breaks.

That is the extreme case. We also know first hand that it doesn’t matter if you are on your first flight of wine or your 30th. The order of the wine tasted plays a significant role on the perceived quality of that wine. This is so powerful and apparent that it doesn’t take a hundred wines to become a factor. This phenomenon can crop up in the first flight of six wines and begin to skew one’s statistical data.

Yikes! What can we do to know if the wine is any good with all of these uncontrolled factors working against us? Well, a great deal of effort is put into these medal competitions. There are scores of behind the scenes people and volunteers keeping the wheels turning and the wine flowing. The data is painstakingly entered into the computers, the wineries have backup bottles incase the bottle has cork taint to maintain consistency. The wine is temperature controlled. Thousands of pieces of stemware are circulated through the judging and cleaned to an odorless sparkle. The wines are served in their respective categories of pricepoint and varietal.

Now comes the judging, all else equal… enter subjectivity. As it has been described to me, a judge imagines what a particular wine from a particular region at a particular price point should taste like. They then undergo their tasting procedure, which varies from taster to taster. When all is said and done, the judge expectorates (our fancy way of spitting into a bowl) and lays down their judgment on a harvest’s worth of work.

Ok, nobody says it’s perfect. But, to me, it is a pretty good representation of a general winetasting. It is also a perfect representation of why we created SanTásti, namely to create a standard where there isn’t one and bring us one step closer to the truth of taste. And these events attract great, rare, and talented palates to come to a centralized location where a million uncontrolled variables of sensory analysis are distilled down to a handful of statistical inconsistencies. Thus bringing us, the wine buyers, closer to an understanding of what the wines taste like before we fork over our money.

And when you do buy that wine and taste it, be honest with yourself because it’s your turn to judge. The judging competitions are there for you, to help you sort through the sea of wine that is available to you. If you end up liking what you try, then great! If not then it’s time to move on to the next bottle.

I hate to end this post with such a generality but it is true. If you like it then it’s good. One of my best teachers once told me that wine is very unique because a lot of us consumers need someone else to tell us if we like it. This is madness.

Welcome to the SanTásti blog. Please enjoy our first video below.