We were lucky enough to have a “SWILL Wine Tasting and Club Starter Kit” sent to us from the good folks at SWILL Party. The kit is everything you need to run your very own blind tasting, all packaged in a cute little box with an instruction manual full of witty charm and good ideas.

For those not familiar, a blind tasting is when you cover your wine bottles with a paper bag or sack. This way you can’t tell which bottle is which. If someone else bags the wines for you and you don’t even know what wines are included, that’s called a “double-blind tasting”.

You can do both types of blind tasting with the SWILL setup. For our party, we chose a single-blind tasting of a few white wines. I tagged the wines we had at the party with “swilltest” for future reference. (You can do this whenever you share wines at a party. Just tag all of those wines with a common tag, then direct folks to search WineLog for that tag later.)

The SWILL party kit comes with just about everything you’ll need, minus the wine and glasses. Here’s the list from the SWILL website:

• 8 wine rating cards which include comprehensive tasting guidelines
• 8 stylish and witty invitations
• the exclusive SWILL™ Hosting 101 Guide with step-by step instructions for hosting a SWILL™
• 8 wine glass markers that each guest can personalize
• 8 stamped wine station bags with 8 elegant black bag ribbons
• 8 SWILL™ pens to write your most profound and witty wine tasting comments
• and a SWILL™ waiter-style corkscrew.

One might note at first how very basic a lot of this stuff is. The “stamped wine station bags” are really just paper bags with the SWILL website stamped on it. The pens are your basic office pens. And while the box and website sport a “waiter-style” corkscrew, our box had one of those two-part jobbers you pick up from the grocery store when you are on vacation and don’t want to spend more than a buck.

The truth is that you could put this together yourself during a quick visit to your local dollar store, but then you run the risk of hosting a sub par tasting party. The SWILL kit has everything already together for you, and by going the do-it-yourself route you’d be missing out on the parts of the kit that are unique: the cute invitation cards, the rating cards, and the very useful guide booklet. There is also something to be said about being part of the SWILL (which stands for “several wine imbibers liking libations”) group.

We passed on using the invite cards, as we broke the SWILL kit out at a party that was already put together. But the SWILL guide has a ton of useful hints and tips for organizing and inviting people to a wine tasting party, even including suggestions for cover charges.

We used the ratings cards, but chose to do a 1-5 point rating (to coincide with WineLog’s star ratings) instead of the 1-4 they suggest. The ratings cards are printed on heavy cardstock with great tasting instructions on the back and room to comment and score the wines on the front. There are only 8 in the set, but you could easily save one to photocopy for future use. From the back of the ratings card:

“First try the wine with your eyes… then with your nose… and finally with your mouth… Push the wine to the front of your mouth and inhale through your teeth. Slosh it around in your mouth and even chew it. Can you taste the wood from the barrels that the wine was stored in? Or maybe it’s the variety of grape that dominates? Now swallow (SWILLers don’t spit). Aftertaste, or finish, is important in some wines — does it linger? What does it remind you of?”

The guide book is really what you’re spending your money on when you purchase the kit. It lays everything out in very easy to follow instructions. Many people are shy about talking about wine in front of others because there is this stigma that you have to be an “oenophile” to mention wine, when really you just have to be a wine lover or kind of like wine. Anyway the SWILL kit guide book gives you confidence when running the tasting, making it great for “wine newbies”. As an intermediate wine drinker (just made that up), I still enjoyed having the guide book there to lean on.

Final Say
At $29.99, the kit is a little pricey for the components. But the experience of having a blind tasting is well worth the money, and the kit can be used over and over again. The “SWILL Wine Tasting and Club Starter Kit” is also a great gift and will do a better job of ensuring that you actually throw one of these parties than a little note on the calendar.

So I think it’s worth it. Give it a shot. People on a budget might want to just check out the website a bit to get the idea and try to throw the party themselves.

If you do throw a party, be sure to log the wines before and update them with your comments afterwards. One word to the wise, be sure to have a designated note collector to sort the notes out after the wines are revealed. After sharing 5 bottles of wine, everyone in our party was too far gone to think to line up the numbers on our notes to the actual wines. So all I know is that I hated wine #2… and not which wine that actually was. It only would have taken 1 person to do this bit of busy work at the end of the tasting to make our great comments more useful for prosperity.