Horizontal (wine)

A horizontal is a special type of wine tasting . It tries to evaluate the quality of the wine in a certain growing region for just one year.

For this purpose, a range is determined in advance in the sample planning, which qualities one would like to deal with: whether it should be wines of a simpler type, or only the top class, or a representative cross-section of these.

Wine tastings of this kind are especially organized for wine from Bordeaux, since the vintage variances can be considerable, with considerable effects on the quality of the wine. In excellent years like 1961, 1982, 1990 or 1996, even simpler goods can produce wines that can stand up to the wines of high-ranking goods (" Grand Cru ") from less good years.

The wine bottles shown are the "yield" of a special horizontal line: to taste the top wines of the legendary 1961 Bordeaux vintage one last time . Here, however, there was a typical risk that there would no longer be reliably excellent wines from such old wines (i.e. the entirety of all products), but only excellent individual bottles - if you were lucky and the bottle "survived".

A special form of the horizontal is the so-called " Arrivage " sample. It measures the quality of the freshly filled and delivered wine for the most recent year available: Wine that is usually available in the wine trade a year and a half or two years after the harvest or a good year after the subscription . A bottle is taken from each of the crates to be tasted.

Matching wines (similar origin, similar presumed class) are put together in " flights ". In a flight there are usually three or four wines in glasses next to each other, which allows you to concentrate on the differences in scents and taste characteristics.

The counterpart to a horizontal is the vertical , in which the wines of a single good are compared against each other over many years.

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