How To Create A
Wine Tasting Score Card

If you're planning to host a wine tasting, you'll want to give out some sort of wine tasting score card or form for everyone to rate the wines on, whether as a home party, or for a restaurant staff or some sort of event.

There are many variations of score cards possible, from short and casual to long and involved. Some can be downloaded online. But really, it is easy to customize your own to fit with your specific event and people doing the tasting.

You can create your cards on a spreadsheet or simple word processing program and print them out on postcards or sheets of paper, as you wish.

Why score the wines?

For one thing, it can be a lot of fun, like a game for adults. It's also purely enjoyable on a sensory level, particularly if the wines are good ones and there are a good variety of types.

It can also be quite useful for your own wine education and developing your palate. Servers and bartenders can increase their knowledge so they know what they are selling and can convey descriptions with sincerity.

Each wine tasting score card can be kept individually to help with future wine shopping. Also, the scores can be consolidated and shared to see what the overall consensus is.

How many to taste?

Five to ten wines would be a good number. It could be all cabernets of varying vintages and/or wineries, or it could be from all one winery, including several varietals, such as a pinot grigio, a chardonnay, a pinot blanc, a gewurtztraminer, a rose, a merlot, a petite syrah, a cabernet and a zinfandel. You could even add a port or dessert wines.

The more wines you taste, the more you must be careful to not overindulge. There should be plenty of food and snacks available. Also, a small taste is enough. Feel free to swirl and spit, allowing the wine to circulate throughout your mouth before spitting it out.

How to score?

After each category, rate the wine being tasted from one to five or one to twenty, or whatever numbers range you choose. Add the scores up at the end to see the overall score. You also could add up everyone's score in each category and divide by the number of guests to get an average score per category, as well as an average overall score for each wine.

Listing the wines

Make sure to list on each wine tasting score card:

• the name of each wine
• the winery
• the vineyard
• the vintage
• the date purchased
• the date tasted, and
• the price if you wish.

Or, for a blind tasting, list this information separately or on the back of each card and only show the numbers assigned to each wine (hide the bottle labels). Then the wine tasters can guess which is which at the end, as in which cab goes with which winery, or which red is which varietal. For the very advanced, try guessing which wine is which vintage!

Categories

Here are just some of the possibilities to consider when adapting your own wine tasting score card; you can adapt at will:

• color depth -- ranges from faded to pale to medium to deep to dark and colorful, depending on the varietal)
• color hue -- whites would range from greenish to pale yellow to very yellow to straw to gold to brown. reds would range from purple to red to brownish red
• clarity -- ranges from cloudy to bitter to dull to clear to brilliant
• viscosity -- sparkly to watery to medium to heavy to oily
• aroma/odor -- ranges from vinegary to off to neutral simple to powerful (you could also rate the range of fruit aroma from none to powerful and bouquet aroma from none to powerful) you can score the intensity as well
• taste -- white wines can range from very dry to very sweet, red wines can be rated by their tannin from astringent to soft. The acidity can range from flat to tart and the body can range from very thin to full bodied/heavy
• finish -- ranges from no finish to bitter to long and lingering
• overall balance -- ranges from un balanced to perfectly balanced
• overall quality -- yuck to superb

In general, aroma and taste categories are more important than appearance, so you can assign various weights to various scores accordingly, or just keep it simple with a 1-5 or 1-10 or 1-20 rating.

You should also add a place for the taster to add notes under each wine score.

When tallying up each wine tasting score card, keep in mind that overall scores may not be a clear indication on how good a wine is, because a wine may score high in all the areas except one, such as smell, and that alone could make the wine one you'd rather avoid. It may be more valuable to look at the individual category scores and the wines with the highest scores across the board would be the best wines to drink.

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