The BLIC Test : A Simple Way To Tell How Good Your Wine Is

Sometimes you will taste a wine that you don’t like – but is it a bad wine? Or is it just not to your personal taste?

Enter stage left: The BLIC Test

As a Wine Consultant I need to be able to objectively judge wines for clients which might not be what I would choose for myself – and the BLIC test is a quick and simple technique to evaluate the quality of a wine.

In the simplest terms a poor wine will have one or none of the following, an average wine will have two, a good wine will have three and an outstanding wine will have all four. You can give half points and tot them up to a total if you like too.

B – Balance

Is everything (acidity, alcohol, flavours, sugars etc) working harmoniously? Nothing dominating anything else too much like overpowering sour acidity or the burn of alcohol?

L – Length

When you have swallowed (or spat) the wine, how long do the flavours last on your palate? This doesn’t mean the heat of the alcohol – you will need to focus on the actual flavours of the wine. In general, the longer the flavours last on the finish, the better quality the wine.

I – Intensity / Identity

Ok, officially this is “Intensity” but I personally feel this is misleading and a little unfair to some of the more delicate wines out there, so I choose to call this “Intensity / Identity”. Can you identify the pronounced aromas and flavours of the wine?

C – Complexity

Following on from the above point, if you can only pick up three or so aromas and flavours then it might be a termed a “simple” wine. That doesn’t necessarily make it bad, some wines are meant to be simple and easy to drink, but in general more outstanding wines will have complexity to them and layers of flavours to show the care and time taken in creating them. These can be primary – the flavours of the grape itself, secondary – the flavours created by the winemaker’s choices in the winemaking process and tertiary – the developing flavours of a wine as it ages.

In short, just because you don’t like a wine doesn’t mean it is automatically “bad” - one person’s meat is another person’s poison and all that. When it comes to training your palate to distinguish both good wine AND wine you personally prefer, ultimately, practise makes perfect!