CMS Blind Tasting Practice — The Deductive Method, with 20 Worked Scenarios

Last updated August 2026

Blind tasting is the part of the sommelier exams you cannot cram for, and it is where most Certified and Advanced candidates lose ground. Theory rewards memory. Tasting rewards a method — a repeatable order of operations you can run under pressure, out loud, in front of an examiner, on a wine you have never met.

These pages are our attempt at the thing that barely exists for free online: structured deductive practice. Twenty complete tasting notes, written the way an examiner would present them, each with four plausible options and a full explanation of why the three wrong answers are wrong. The reasoning is the point. Knowing that a wine is Northern Rhône Syrah is worth very little; being able to say peppercorn, olive, cured meat, 13% alcohol, firm chalky tannin, therefore cool-climate Syrah, and here is why it is not Barossa is what passes.

How the deductive method actually works

The Court’s approach moves in a fixed sequence — sight, then nose, then palate, then an initial conclusion, then a final conclusion — and the discipline is that you do not jump ahead. Candidates fail by deciding on the answer at first sniff and then bending every subsequent observation to fit it. The method exists precisely to stop you doing that.

Sight narrows more than people expect. A pale, translucent red with an orange-tinged rim rules out most of the world before you have smelled anything. Staining tells you about anthocyanin concentration. A green tinge in a white suggests youth and cool climate; deep gold suggests age, oxidative handling, botrytis or all three.

Nose is where you gather evidence, not where you decide. Work in categories — fruit, floral, herbal, earth, oak, other — because the categories force you to notice things you would otherwise skip. Specific compounds matter here: pyrazines give the green bell pepper of cool-grown Cabernet and Carmenère, rotundone gives peppercorn in Syrah and Grüner Veltliner and accumulates in cool sites, thiols give the passion fruit and grapefruit of Marlborough Sauvignon, and TDN gives the petrol note that only appears in Riesling with bottle age.

Palate is where most identifications are actually settled, because structure lies less than aroma does. Acid tells you about climate. Tannin level and texture separate varieties that smell similar. Alcohol tells you about ripeness and therefore latitude, altitude and vintage heat. The classic Nebbiolo trap — pale colour, high acid, high drying tannin — is only solvable on the palate.

How to use these scenarios

Read the note straight through before you look at the options. Commit to an answer out loud, with your reasoning, exactly as you would in an exam. Only then open the reveal. If you got it right for the wrong reason, count it as wrong — that is the habit that separates candidates who improve from candidates who plateau.

Each explanation names all three distractors and says specifically why the note excludes them. That is deliberate. In a real exam you are not choosing from four options, you are eliminating a whole world of wine, and the muscle you need is the one that says this cannot be Barolo, because Barolo would not have this tannin texture.

• Red wine scenarios — 10 complete tasting notes
• White wine scenarios — 10 complete tasting notes

A note on why there are twenty and not sixty

We had a much larger set drafted. We put it through review and roughly two-thirds of it had problems — tasting notes that did not actually lead to the stated answer, markers attributed to the wrong compound, options that were secretly the same wine. We binned it. A blind tasting scenario that trains the wrong deduction is worse than no scenario at all, because you will carry that error into the exam room. These twenty have each been checked against published sources, and we would rather grow the set slowly than pad it.