Blind Tasting Competition #3 - Caros Grey Lynn - 02/11/2026

Nov 4

Our third blind tasting competition, and probably our best so far, was an incredible night.

We love connecting with members of our wine industry and of course putting them through their paces.

We did things slightly differently this time. Still three rounds, but we progressed from easier questions and wines to some quite diabolical ones.

We’re always interested in the results: who works well together in a team, and who goes their own way. Regardless, there were plenty of moans throughout the evening and a lot of stink eye directed at us.

Amazingly, with Round 1, mostly a round of Chardonnays, there were a lot of papers saying the wines were Sauvignon Blanc or Chenin Blanc. A very small portion spotted wine 4 as being Pinot Gris, fewer spotted it as the odd wine out, and even fewer told us that it was a Central Otago Pinot Gris. The bonus questions of most expensive wine and which wine is the oldest gained people the most points and were answered correctly by almost everyone.

Round 2 was a real defining factor. There were people who had done quite well with their team’s overall score backing them but stumbled dramatically in this round. On the other hand, some contestants obviously have a great affinity for Italian wines and managed to get almost full marks. The problem here is that if you didn’t decide the grape variety was Sangiovese, it was going to be very hard to get points in the bonus round questions. Our wording on the third bonus question, “Which was the first civilisation to cultivate this grape variety?”, prompted almost everyone to write “The Roman Empire”. While we gave points for this, only one person gave the truly correct answer: “The Etruscans”.

Round 3 was bloody and over pretty quickly. When you start asking questions about grape genetics, people tend to go belly up. While the questions were hard, the wines were lovely, all having a silky texture, driven acid structure, and the feeling that, given the right opportunity in the vineyard, they could end up much more alcoholic and sweeter than what we provided. This seems to be a link for some of the progeny of Savagnin. We tried to make our contestants feel a little bit of control by making two out of three bonus questions multiple choice.

In the end, the scores were VERY close. Our winner took out the top score by only two points, with places two and three separated by 0.5 points, and places four and five sharing the same score and again trailing by only 0.5 points. If you’re interested in statistics at all, the average score was 36.5, and the highest score in round 3 was 13 points.

We also had some late interest from people wanting to come along and watch rather than compete. We joked that we weren’t quite at that level yet, but moving towards the premier wine tasting competition is a goal of ours. We would eventually love to have spectators, so we could improve the range and quality of the wines we’re showing

Our winners:

3. James Pryor – 47.5 Points

2. Yannan Zhou – 48 Points

1. Regan McCaffery – 50 Points

The team at Caros were simply incredible. Since the last competition they made certain we were going to be comfortable in their space and offered to help us with anything we needed. We truly could not have made this happen without them. Thank you Regan and Danielle.

Finally, a massive thank you to our partners and wives who helped us with this event, and give us space to do this for you.