How To Never See Wine The Same Way Again: See It As A Blind Person Would

Here's how to never see wine the same way again. Ready?

Start with the glass of wine held away from you. Breathe in and out through your nose, deeply, several times. (This puts you in a good place to experience the wine.)

Then, when you're ready, bring the glass back, cover the opening with your hand, and swirl. (This concentrates the aroma.) Lift the glass to your nose right before you take your hand away, and notice the less and more intense smells that waft your way.

After a moment, take a sip of the wine and swish it around your mouth, like mouthwash. (This coats your entire palate and allows all the parts of your mouth to taste the wine.) Swallow, and allow yourself the time to really notice how it feels as it makes its way into your body.

At the next sip, "chew" on the wine before you swallow it. Literally, chew. (It may be unconventional and you may get some strange looks, but trust me on this. You'll experience the wine as you've never experienced wine before.)

Got all that?

Now, do it again and this time, do it blindfolded. At that point you might -- might -- start to get an idea of what it's like to taste wine without the "distraction" of being able to see.

"You don't need to see in order to enjoy life," said Hoby Wedler, a wine educator at the Francis Ford Coppola Winery in Geyserville, in Sonoma County. Wedler would know: he's been blind since birth. He has also been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Food & Drink, he's currently finishing his doctoral thesis in computational organic chemistry at the University of California at Davis, and he's been chosen as a White House "Champion of Change" for his work on STEM education and careers for the visually impaired.

Wedler, in other words, sees wine -- and his role as a blind person in society -- differently every single day.

Since 2013, Wedler has been innovating the experience of blind wine tasting at Coppola through a recurring program called Tasting in the Dark, which is accessible to both the public and the trade. Participants are under blindfold for a little more than an hour, and Wedler's goal is to create an experience where blindness is represented in a positive and authentic way.

Rather than being gimmicky or weird, Wedler said, the idea is to demonstrate how blindness works to the participants' advantage and actually enhances the experience.

How is blindness an advantage when it comes to tasting wine?

It's all about removing the distractions.

"We're able to focus our attention more pointedly on the task at hand," Wedler said. "We aren't distracted by the visual images, by someone making a face across the table from us, or a bird outside the window, or a weird picture hanging on the wall, or the mere presence of an iPhone on the table. They're all slightly pulling our attention away. When those are removed, we can experience [wine] in a way we haven't before."

From Wedler's perspective, flavor and aroma are a language, just like standard written or spoken English is a language. The trick is knowing how to fit those vocabulary words together well. Then, he said, "we can start to form sentences and lay flavors out in a bottle of wine, or put a dish together when we're making great food, much like a writer might compose a great piece of work."

Cathy Huyghe is the co-founder of Enolytics and the author of Hungry for Wine: Seeing the World through the Lens of a Wine Glass. Find her online at cathyhuyghe.com, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.