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Wine can come with a lot of pomp and circumstance, not to mention plenty of confusing rules. Should you swill or spit? Is room temperature the only way to drink red? Is it really worth spending £60 on that fancy-looking bottle of white to impress your in-laws at the next family dinner?
When it comes to vino, there are a lot of questions and even more perplexing answers. It’s no wonder that one in three of us find wine etiquette ‘snobbish’ and 32 percent of us are flummoxed by wine jargon.
Enter Lidl. The budget supermarket is on a mission to democratise wine and prove that (especially with holidays like Christmas coming up) you don’t need to empty your purse in order to quaff top-quality bottles, and more importantly ones you’ll actually enjoy.
In order to turn us all into oenophiles, Lidl is bringing back its wine tasting in the dark pop-up ‘Chateaux Noir’, four years after its initial sell-out run. Guests will enter an intriguing-sounding ‘palate cleansing tunnel’ before being plunged into a pitch-black tasting room where waiters wearing night-vision-googles will serve up a selection of tipples, ranging from affordable Lidl vinos to more expensive big-brand varieties.
Your job? To sink them all back and then decide which ones you like best without being swayed by what the bottle looks like. The idea is to put all snobbery aside, and just let your senses guide you to the right wine for your palate.
Along the way, Lidl GB’s Master of Wine Richard Bampfield will be adding some festive sparkle to the tasting, dishing out easy-to-learn wine knowledge, telling you which wine rules to ditch for good (Guess what? You can drink chilled red wine after all) and prove that you should never judge a wine by its bottle. By the end, you’ll come out into the daylight having found tipples you’ll want to drink again and again. Chin chin.
The blind wine tastings will begin in Leake Street Waterloo before heading to Glasgow and Liverpool. Tickets are £5 for an hour-long tasting with all proceeds going to the NSPCC.